It wasn’t until the day after I heard the Mousetrap parody of OK Go’s relatively recent Rube Goldberg-esque video that the whole “original work vs parody/remake” devaluation argument started to gain any traction in my thinking. There was a song stuck in my head, and it wasn’t the original. Is imitation still flattery if that’s possible?
This particular matter was already on my mind because just a few weeks earlier there was all that drama over the Downfall parody videos on YouTube. In a nutshell, after much time and the creation of many videos, the film’s owner, Constantin Films, asked YouTube to take them all down. The backlash was fierce, as you might expect from a community that had put hours into creating and enjoying the re-subtitling of a particular four-minute clip lifted from the 2004 German-Austrian epic (178 minutes in the extended cut) about Hitler. Debates over whether these new videos could actually be defined as parody ensued. Several commenters questioned what possible harm the clips could have done, regardless. Was it not much more likely that the clip encouraged people to see the film simply because, without the spoofs, far fewer would have even known of its existence? Anecdotally, others weighed in to say that this was indeed true in their personal experience. Still, was it possible that Constantin Films felt that the parodies were making too light of their very serious film and the publicity wasn’t worth the perceived damage?
I have no real idea what was behind the film owner’s sudden erasure move. However, perhaps because YouTube alerted users that they could protest the takedown and that their videos would be available once again while the claims were investigated, many of the videos appear to be available again. In addition, so powerful was the meme that Hitler himself quickly responded to the takedown in style.
For those who argued that the clip’s use wasn’t true parody because it used the original film rather than creating a “cover” (Ã la Weird Al), the clip was re-imagined by one super talented (and apparently not-German-fluent) actor.
So much creativity! It warms my heart, regardless of the legal issues in play. Okay, all that is fun and interesting and trendy, but to get back to the OK Go situation, in this case the foundation (same notes, more or less) is given a new (and quite memorable) story to tell. For your entertainment/comparison: