Cowabunga

I like turtles. I love retrailers.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

No Mashups Are Mishaps

I first became aware of the retrailer sometime in the early fall of 2005 — not via YouTube, as the site had then scarcely begun to exist — with a retooled Shining trailer that imagined the horror classic as a feel-good family comedy:

This gem says a lot of things, however elliptically, about the ways in which we interact with popular culture through time — for instance, the suggestion that a film could attain totemic significance by unnerving us to our sinews only to finally evolve, 25 years after the artifact’s release, into singularly effluvial kitsch; or that Peter Gabriel’s song “Solsbury Hill”, released in 1977 (the same year as the original novel The Shining), a song about a moment of spiritual epiphany of all things, would have lain dormant in the culture for most of that time period before a sudden deluge of exposure in movie trailers of the early 21st Century would render it the nadir of treacly commercialism.

Since then we’ve had a number of these things, including Ten Things I Hate About Commandments, 8 1/2 Mile, and Brokeback to the Future.

Sure, one can reduce the phenomenon to a pedestrian meddling between the sacred and the profane, the artistic and the opportunistic (approximating Riff Market‘s digression on Girl Talk) — but the main takeaway seems to be that these things are fun.

Flash forward to May 2009, wherein Andrew Sullivan, via Buzzfeed, points to an interpretation of Dirty Dancing as a David Lynch film:

Now somebody envision Mulholland Drive as an episode of Three’s Company, and we’re really driving somewhere.