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kottke.org posts about remix

Star Wars in the style of Dr. Seuss

A series of drawings by Adam Watson that imagine Star Wars characters drawn in the style of Dr. Seuss.

Seuss Star Wars

I sense a presence
which I know to be
the old Jedi,
Obi-Wan Kenobi

I sense his presence
I know he’s near
but I can’t find him
there or here!

(via @followSol)


Mister Rogers remixed and autotuned

PBS teamed up with Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for this remix, “the first in a series of PBS icons remixed.” I’ve listened to this 5 times.

You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. (via sly oyster)


The Wire: The Musical

This is amazing…a trailer for a musical version of The Wire done by Funny or Die. Featuring real cast members from the show like Michael K. Williams as Omar, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, and Andre Royo as Bubbles.

(via @monstro)


Frida Kahlo rocking Daft Punk

Fabian Ciraolo does illustrations that mash up old and new pop culture. My favorite is Frida Kahlo rocking a Daft Punk t-shirt:

Frida Kahlo Daft Punk

Here are a few others I particularly like:

Dali Vampire Weekend

Dorothy Bling

He-Man Plaid


Neutral Milk Hotel + hip hop = whoa!

This is great so far: Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea mashed up with hip hop. (via av club)


Sabotage! You know, for kids

As a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, James Winters and his family made this parody of the video Sabotage with kids playing all the roles.

Charming, although I might have gone with squirt guns instead of the more realistic item.

(via @moth)


Walt Disney’s Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver reimagineered to portray Travis Bickle as obsessed with Mickey Mouse.

(via waxy)


If rock bands were sandwiches

At McSweeney’s, John Peck whips up some bandwiches.

Bjork: Sliced narwhal, mustard, whole wheat bread.

Grateful Dead: Lemon verbena sorbet, peanut butter, clarified hemp butter, deep-fried brownie bites, M&Ms, stale focaccia.

Sex Pistols: Deep-fried Frank Sinatra LP, Russian mustard, spackle, tacks, stale rye bread.

John Cage: Silence, warmth, indirect sunlight, the memory of lettuce, the idea of bread.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Bacon-double cheeseburger, mescaline pesto, sourdough bread.


The Hood Internet: The Mixtape Volume Six

Wooooo! The Hood Internet has just released the sixth installment of their Mixtape series. You can listen to the whole thing here:

or download it here. Their five previous Mixtapes are some of the most-played music in my collection…I’m listening to volume five right now actually.


Super Mario Bros, the abridged version

A Super Mario Summary is a abbreviated version of the original Super Mario Bros game in which each of the levels has been squeezed into one screen. For instance, here’s World 1-1:

Super Mario Summary

(via waxy)


Movie mimicking

As Allen Fuqua travels around, he looks for movie locations and attempts to duplicate scenes from them. For instance, here’s Allen and a friend reenacting a scene from Drive:

Drive Mimic

(thx, stephen)


Watching 130 episodes of The Simpsons simultaneously

If you’ve never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:

Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.

About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)

A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px

I also enjoyed this minimalist representation of the Simpson family in Lego:

Simpsons in Lego

(via @TrevorBaum)


Alternate reality: a same-sex Depression

For her project My Pie Town, Debbie Grossman modified Depression-era photos to depict all-female families.

Pie Town

Joan Myers’ biography of Doris Caudill (Doris is in many of the pictures), Pie Town Woman, describes her husband, Faro, as less than helpful on the homestead. I had downloaded a portrait of Doris and Faro from the Library of Congress website, and because it was so high-resolution, it occurred to me that I had enough pixels to work with that I could alter the image. I removed Faro, and I loved the opportunity to look at Doris on her own and imagine a different life for her. I thought it would be fun to remake the whole town in a way that reflected my own family, and I imagined a Pie Town filled with women.

The main reason for doing so was to give us the unusual experience of getting to see a contemporary idea of family (female married couples as parents, for example) as if it were historical. But I am also very interested in using Photoshop to create imaginary or impossible images-this is something I have done in other work as well.

(via @riondotnu)


New Star Wars movie! By Topher Grace?

According to Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm, Topher Grace has made an 85-minute cut of Star Wars episodes I, II, and III where Jar Jar appears only briefly, midichlorians are not mentioned, and Jake Lloyd is not seen or heard from.

Whats most shocking is that with only 85 minutes of footage, Topher was able to completely tell the main narrative of Anakin Skywalker’s road from Jedi to the Sith. While I know the missing pieces and could even fill in the blanks in my head as the film raced past, none of those points were really needed. Whats better is that the character motivations are even more clear and identifiable, a real character arc not bogged down by podraces, galactic senates, Jar Jar Binks, politics or most of the needless parts of the Star Wars prequels. It not only clarifies the story, but makes the film a lot more action-packed.

Sadly, it was a one-time screening for friends. (via ★interesting links)


Super Mario Bros with a Portal gun

Mari0, the Super Mario Bros + Portal mashup I posted about last August, is now finished and available for download for Windows, OS X, and Linux.


Victorian Star Trek

Your favorite Star Trek characters, all daguerreotyped up.

Victorian Star Trek

By the same guy, I also really like this Reservoir Dogs take:

Star Trek Reservoir Dogs


The music of Daft Punk revisited on vintage video game systems

Daft Punk already sort of sounds like they make their music using vintage video game systems but Da Chip is what that would actually sound like. Better than I expected. (via @shauninman)


N***as in Paris at Midnight

This is so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can’t even tell if it’s any good or not: a mashup of Jay-Z and Kanye’s N***as in Paris and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

(via ★davidfg)


Peter Sellers covers The Beatles

Peter Sellers did four different spoken word versions of The Beatles’ She Loves You: as Dr. Strangelove, with a Cockney accent, with an Irish accent, and with an upper crust English accent (my fave):

Yeah, Sellers is pretty good with accents. (via ★bump)


Truthful movie posters

Posters for Oscar nominated movies that maybe tell the truth of each movie a bit more than the conventional posters. For instance, Iron Lady becomes Total Bitch, Tree of Life becomes Wuh?, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo becomes All the Rape, No Subtitles.

All the Rape, No Subtitles

(via ★vuokko)


Premakes: new movies with old actors

If recent movies like The Hangover, Drive, Inception, and Rushmore had been made in an earlier era, who would have starred in and directed these premakes? How about Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, and Jerry Lewis in The Hangover?

Now Then Movies 01

Or Inception directed by Fritz Lang?

Now Then Movies 02

(thx, al)


Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, covered and covered and covered

Adele’s Rolling in the Deep has been covered thousands of times on YouTube…here’s 70 of those performances cut together into one seamless song.

(via ★davidfg)


Clip art album covers

On the Clipart covers blog, you’ll find noted album covers redone with clip art and Comic Sans.

Clip Art Covers 1

Clip Art Covers 2

Clip Art Covers 3

(via @aaroncoleman0)


Fotoshop, the world’s best beauty product

Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.

(via stellar)


Dubtrot: My Little Pony dubstep

You’ve probably seen the NY Times correction that everyone’s talking about. Ok, not everyone, just everyone who works in media. Anyway, here it is:

An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

Here is said article. Jim Romenesko talked to Amy Harmon, the reporter who wrote the article, and uncovered this magical tidbit:

I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as “dubtrot,” — a take-off on “dubstep,” get it? — in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.

Dubtrot! And leave it Urban Dictionary to gild the lily.

Dubstep music relating to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Often created by bronies, dubtrot can include dubstep remixes of songs from the show and original pieces created as homage or in reference to the show.

Bronies! Defined as:

The term used to describe the fan community(usually of the older group, males and females) of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Anyway, would you like to listen to some dubtrot? Of course you would: Rainbowstep, Rainbow Dubtrot, and fluttershymix.


Photo Remakes of Famous Art

I love everything about this…I scrolled through the entire list. This one was my favorite:

Van Gogh Self before

Van Gogh Self after

(via waxy)


Shufflin’ grandpa

One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:

See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)


Sci-fi children’s books

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, a list of science fiction books for the little ones.

Very Deadly Bounty Hunter


Send in the Republican clowns

I wish these were bipartisan, but this suprisingly large collection of prominent Republicans made up with clown paint is still pretty amazing. Here’s Texas governor Rick Perry:

Clown Perry


The Fantastic and Inglourious Mr. Fox

A trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox using dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

(via biancolo)