Monday, June 02, 2008

I Will Do Anything For a Laugh

DOUBLE UDPATE: The comments on this thing are amazing. I'd say a good 4/5 have generally nice things to say - they enjoyed the video, they find me intensely sexually attractive or they support Leah in the contest. Those other 1/5 are just...well, it's the kind of hilarious obscenity you can only get from YouTube comments.

A lot of them feel the need to inform me of my own latent homosexuality. And I think we can all sympathize. How often have you been watching a clearly comical video on the Internet and thought..."Hey, the gentleman who made this is wearing something typically associated with females, or those of a different body type! He must therefore be gay, and is most likely unaware of his own sexual orientation and proclivities! I think I ought to inform him of such, lest he go through his life not realizing that he was physically attracted to members of his own gender!"

UPDATE: Leah's video may actually be going viral. It has been up for less than 24 hours and is currently showing 25,336 views on YouTube. Holy crap.

Seriously. I mean...this is too far...



Can I please stay on the Internet, please? I promise not to wear any more midriffs.

To be honest, when Leah first suggested it, I was a bit conflicted about this one. Are people laughing with me? Or at me? It took approximately two comments on the Mahalo Daily page for someone to show up and make a cheap shot at my lack of fitness.

In the end, I decided...If it's funny, it's worth doing. Call it the Chris Farley Principle.

By the way, here's Andrea's video from the day before, that was also fun to shoot and features me in a guest role:



Sorry I forgot to post that this morning...Total oversight.

AND of course, there's your Behind-the-Scenes bonus feature:

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Save the Clock Tower!

This afternoon, a fire at Universal Studios consumed some of the King Kong park tour attraction, the "New York Street" sets and much of Hill Valley from the Back to the Future films. (Mercifully, the film's most iconic landmark setting, the Clock Tower, was spared).

Reading this Slashfilm post about the fire's aftermath was actually kind of trippy. I mean, these are sets for movies that have already been made. They are no longer functional at all, but exist only as part of a guided tour showing people behind-the-scenes of how movies are made. And yet...there is a real emotional attachment to these places, because of their involvement in classic movies. I bet a lot more people would be upset to hear that the fictional Back to the Future clock tower burned down than some random actual clock tower in a real town.

I mean, they're going to rebuild the Hill Valley set. Rebuild a set for a movie that's long-finished! Just so they can drive tourists in front of it! Now that's real, authentic, behind-the-scenes movie magic!

Now here's where things get...really pomo. This Hill Valley set...it wasn't the real one from the movie.

The courthouse square set was not the original set used in the time-travel trilogy. Just after the sequels finished shooting, almost the entire square was burned down in the 1990 fire (which also took down New York Street). It was rebuilt from the original blueprints.

What's with all the horrific Universal Studio fires? Is that Backdraft attraction behind all of this? Because it's really not all that cool anyway...you guys could probably ditch it...