Parody of a parody of a parody of a parody of a parody…

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Just recently, I awoke from a dream. In the world of this dream, there was a short (5 or 10 minute) documentary that, supposedly, everyone had heard of, has seen, and knows about. Also, in this dream world, They Might Be Giants did a parody of this video.

Now, in this dream, Odradak decided to do a big creative project: make a parody of the They Might be Giants parody of this documentary video. He ended up getting ahold of quite a bit of video gear, video editing systems, and video post-production software. He enlisted a bunch of us to star in, narrate, and edit the video.

He wrote and produced the video. It ended up being excellent! Finally, after enough prodding, we managed to convince him that it would be a good idea to place it on his website. The video was damn funny, and we thought that everyone would be interested and entertained.

It was true–a good number of people seemed to like the video, based on the fan email and people mentioning it to one another in person (“hey, did you see that new video…”). Finally, some site like SomethingAwful (this is a funny site that routinely locates sites and bashes them) got their hands on the link and ripped it apart. They bashed the video. “A parody of a parody of a bad video?!” “This thing is not funny to anyone but 3 year olds!” “The writer should have his fingers cut off so he can’t write anything else.” At the end of their article, they praised some of the technical merits–the special effects and camera work were great.

Odradak heard this one bad review and was ready to pull the site, destroy his computers, and jump off a bridge–never to be creative again. Nobody else took this bad article seriously. After all, this was a site that regularly made stuff up, bent the truth, and flat out lied sometimes–just to make for bitter, funny reading. They praised the execution (not the content)–but Ordradak was deaf to this. Everyone was trying to convince him that his creative work was good. People were talking about the video offline–at work, at coffee shops, at parties. It was hugely successful, but he kept being fixated on that one bad review that eventually disappeared (because several other bad reviews of other people’s sites caused this particular one to scroll off the site’s homepage).

Posted in: Dear Diary Dreams

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