1/29/2008 - What song is this? (2 videos)

One of the highlights of Weird Al's Amish Paradise video (a parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise) is towards the end where the video is being played backwards but all of Al's actions were done in reverse anyway. This has the effect of making it look like Weird Al is singing normally, but the rest of the world is moving backwards. Skip forward to the end of this video to see what it looks like:



It's obvious, though, that Weird Al is only lip-syncing backwards. While he does a very convincing job, actually singing it backwards would be very hard to do. If you'd played a voice recording of yourself backwards, the sounds you hear are very hard to mimic. And yet, that doesn't mean that people don't try. Here's somebody that did and uses it to make you guess what song he is singing:

9/24/2007 - Ode To A Superhero

This Weird Al song is not as great as his Star Wars Episode I song, The Saga Begins, but it's still good enough to feature here. It's a song about the first Spider-Man movie and the YouTuber here made it into a music video which serves as the introduction to Spider-Man 2 (note the credits interspersed in the video). It's a good edit job with the Weird Al lyrics, footage of Spider-Man 1, and the actual credit sequence of Spider-Man 2 combined all together seamlessly.

9/4/2007 - White & Nerdy in Lego

Weird Al Yankovic is simply the best. I remember watching his first parody of a Michael Jackson video with "Eat it", and it was a riot. His parodies are great in three major ways: the lyrics, which are verbally similar to and tonally in sync with the originals; the subject matter, which are always of a humorous nature and which are delved into in the most detailed way; and his performances of the parodies themselves -- parodies of songs are never any good if the performance was only above average.

Weird Al's most recent parody is perhaps one of my favorites mainly because of the subject matter. "White and Nerdy" (a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire) details so much about the geek lifestyle that it's almost a litmus test of how nerdy you are. Even though I'm not white, I can identify with most of the descriptions he gives of nerds in the song. Kind of scary, but hey, it's the way I chose to live my life.

Anyway, while Weird Al's video of "White and Nerdy" is hilarious, this video of the song is even more impressive in that it's done entirely using Lego pieces. I don't know how many man hours it took to create this video, but it really looks like a Herculean effort. It took a lot of dedication to do something like this, but I'm willing to bet that the creator or creators of this video fits the song title perfectly, and as such, this would have been a labor of love.

6/3/2007 - The Saga Begins

Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace is widely considered the worst of all the Star Wars movies. I probably would concur with that, but I wouldn't say it was a horrible movie. Jar Jar is certainly annoying, but I think he was less annoying than the Ewoks. At least Jar Jar was annoying on purpose! What really irks me was how they made the Jedis total stiffs. I think that's why Anakin chose the Dark Side. I mean, look how cool Darth Maul is compared to this guy:

LAME

If you think about it, there weren't any compelling characters on the side of good in the prequels. That's why I think the original trilogy owes so much of its success to Harrison Ford and the Han Solo character. In other words, the prequels are like the X-Men movies without Wolverine.

The one thing about Episode I for me that stood out was the fact that Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song about it before it came out in theaters using nothing but internet spoilers! I think that might have been the first movie to have the entire plot revealed on the internet. Weird Al's song is great, though. Set to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie", it's a complete summary of the entire movie without reference to Jar Jar. While Weird Al did make a music video out of it, I think this is a better version: