Back in 2008 Sirmixalott116 combined footage from Saved by the Bell with scenes from the film There Will Be Blood to create this re-cut trailer. The remix eerily forecasts the current ‘dirty energy’ vs. environmental ecology debate that is now raging in the United States (made more urgent by the BP Gulf catastrophe). When the students at Bayside High find out that the wealth of oil found under their campus has spilled out into their pond, they begin to challenge the power dynamic of their school and stage a protest to stop the oil development.
There Will Be Blood, a 2007 American film by Paul Thomas Anderson, was loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! and follows a man on a ruthless quest for wealth during the oil boom. Saved by the Bell, on the other hand, was a 90′s high school sitcom that paved the way for teen shows dealing with social issues by introducing young target audiences to critical topics like drug use, drinking and driving, homelessness and environmental issues. But when remixed, the two delve into the institutional greed and environmental destruction no TV show or has yet dared to explore, despite the timeliness of the topic.
An internet meme has been building around the blockbuster movie Avatar, starting with the countless reviews and critics pointing out the striking plot similarities to Disney’s 1998 animated feature Pocahontas. By now there are literally dozens of re-cut trailers online making the comparison but beyond just pointing out the parallels, these mashups also demonstrate how prevalent the racist “Mighty Whitey” trope really is in Hollywood.
First up is Randy Szuch’s version which takes the audio from the official Avatar trailer and replaces the visuals with footage from Disney’s Pocahontas, amazing it works perfectly.
This remixed trailer re-envisions the 1990 romantic comedy film “Pretty Woman”. The original movie stars Richard Gere as a wealthy businessman and Julia Roberts as women who prostitutes herself on the streets of New York City. The original film was supposed to be a dark drama dealing with the difficult lives of sex workers but was rewritten into a Cinderella-type romantic comedy prior to production.
“Pretty Woman” reinforced and glamorized a myth that prostitution is a way to find a wealthy husband, a myth that conveniently conceals the harsh realities of sex work on the street. It also hinds the fact that woman often enter the sex trade as a way to economically support themselves when few other options are available.
Here, FunkyBeccaBecca re-edits the movie trailer re-imagining it in a more appropriate genre, horror. She adds a new soundtrack and with it re-frames Richard Gere’s character transforming him from “wealthy savor” to violent controlling predator.
This mashup has become hugely popular on Youtube, viewed over a million times. The remixer re-imagines a trailer for the 1980′s blockbuster hit Top Gun creating a new narrative in which the very straight macho fighter jet pilots Maverick and Iceman have a romantic and sexual relationship. We consider this remix “queer-positive” because it subverts the fictional “all heterosexual” world of Top Gun by imposing queer relationships into the story.
By now we are all familiar with this remix phenomenon where creators take heterosexual TV and movie characters and than re-cut the footage to create queer relationships. These videos come in many forms but by far the most popular are the remixed Brokeback trailers, of which there are literally hundreds online. Although this remix is not really classified as a “vid”, in the vidding world this type of sexuality re-framing is called slash or femslash (which we will talk about in more detail in a later post).
We think these works are of political importance because they are critical of and expose how the mass media makes straight characters and relationships the standard social norm while queer relationships and lifestyles are often excluded, marginalization or demonized.
On this site we look critically at these remixes and place them in two camps, queer-positive and queer-negative. We define “queer-negative” remixes as those that encourage the viewer to laugh at the re-framed sexuality frequently by queering oddball, weird or quirky fictional characters (like the Brokeback to the Future mash-up). We don’t often post these because they are often tinged with homophobic humor. In contrast, we define “queer-positive” remixes as those that invite the viewer to identify with, sympathize with or celebrate the newly created queer relationship. Often these works remix the stereotypical and highly gendered roles of straight characters in mass media. Its a very fine line with a lot of gray area and not always clear but we at least use this as our lens for viewing these types of remixes.
So in short, queer-positive remixes attempt to subvert heteronormativity, while queer-negative ones mocks characters that aren’t portrayed as “normal.”
Another Star Wars themed remix found on youtube, this one taking the audio of Obi Won Kenobi’s famous monologue in A New Hope: Episode 4 where he explains The Empire to a young Luke Skywalker and mixing it with footage of the Bush Administration and it’s War in Iraq. Here also is another slightly different version of this mash-up.
A TV movie trailer remix from video remixer Elisa Kreisinger created by mashing corporate media’s over sexualized depiction of women with the ad for the misogynistic horror flick Captivity.
Another brokeback style movie trailer remix that “queers” mainstream straight culture. In this video the creator takes a queer negative movie (the Harry Potter franchise has no real queer themes or characters at all) and uses remix to create a positive queer relationship and storyline. Even so there is a fine line, in this emerging genre, between negatively making fun of queer culture and positively celebrating it.
Note: Above the word queer is used as a positive verb meaning to reevaluate or reinterpret a work with an eye to sexual orientation and/or gender.
