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A pair of dancers from the Polish National Ballet perform a dance to Reckoner by Radiohead, choreographed by Robert Bondara. This is from a longer performance featuring a number of Radiohead songs. The whole performance briefly popped up online over the weekend but is gone now. The video above is the only clip I could find on YouTube — hopefully the whole thing will be available again at some point.
The iconic album cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a collage of images of dozens of people — mostly famous, mostly men — arranged as though they’re standing in a group behind the band. A list of the people depicted on the cover (including Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Shirley Temple, and Fred Astaire) can be found on Wikipedia but Chris Shaw went a step further and tracked down the exact source images for each one of people & objects shown.
The collage was designed by Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, and the cut-outs were assembled in Michael Cooper’s London photographic studio. Michael and his team toiled hard to construct the ‘cast of extras’, using a mix of photos sourced from the BBC Hulton Picture Library, images from private collections, waxworks and personal artifacts, including a gnome owned by Ringo Starr.
You so rarely get to see the raw materials used for design objects, so this is a real treat. (via waxy)
Hunter Davis does an amazing impression of Ian McKellen and used it to recite the lyrics to the Duck Tales theme song as if he were Gandalf.
Somehow I have never seen this video before (it’s from 2009!) and it made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt. I watched it three times in the row but had to stop to post this. See also If Ian McKellen performed “Baby Got Back”, which is really good as well but doesn’t contain the phrase “it’s a duck blur” so 2nd place. (via laura olin)
Over the past two decades, musical group Vitamin String Quartet has covered the songs of dozens of musical artists and groups, from Jimi Hendrix to PJ Harvey to Eminem. In the video embedded above, they cover bad guy by Billie Eilish, apparently one of several covers that appears in Bridgerton (haven’t seen it). The group’s music has also appeared in Westworld, most notably Radiohead’s Motion Picture Soundtrack. And, I just this second made this connection: VSQ also did the Strung Out on OK Computer album, a longtime staple of my music for working.
This. This is the stuff. Lapping water, wind through the tall grass, patient trains, birds, rolling countryside, mountains, sleeping, castles in motion, and more calm scenes compiled from Studio Ghibli movies.
See also hundreds of Studio Ghibli backgrounds for your Zoom calls and 10 Hours of Extremely Relaxing Ocean Scenes & 40 Hours of Relaxing Planet Earth II Sounds, both from BBC Earth. (via laura olin)
Netflix spoofed their own hit show by photoshopping Beth Harmon from The Queen’s Gambit intensely playing children’s board games like Operation, Monopoly, Connect Four, and Jenga.
Ariel Avissar made this 2.5-minute supercut of giant moons from movies — like E.T., The Nightmare Before Christmas, Spider-Man, The Lion King, Black Swan, Despicable Me — accompanied by Frank Sinatra’s rendition of Fly Me to the Moon.
I have been on this internet for a long damn time and somehow this has escaped my attention until just this morning: Disney reuses bits of animation in their movies and TV shows *all the time*. And blatantly so — just check out this comparison of sequences from The Jungle Book (made in 1967) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (made in 1977):
There are many other instances of this reuse throughout Disney’s catalog of animation — The Fox and the Hound, 101 Dalmatians, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood etc.:
For animators under time constraints and on a budget, recycling footage was a sensible thing to do and probably wasn’t widely known among the viewing public until extensive at-home viewing, digital editing, and collecting sleuthing via the internet became available.
This is one of those posts that’s really easy to understand — it’s the famous intro to The Simpsons recreated using stock footage, just like the title says right up there — but I’ve gotta write something here to take up a little space and time, so I end up just saying the same thing using the same words (intro, Simpsons, recreated, stock, footage) like you’re all 3 years old or something. (Why do we need more than six words to describe this?) Anyway, this video is the introduction to the American television show The Simpsons recreated using only stock video footage. Enjoy.
See also: stock footage intros to Duck Tales and Friends and the stock footage trailer for Koyaanisqatsi. (via the morning news)
This is a fun discovery, via Laura Olin’s newsletter: a Korean acapella group called Maytree that does impressions of famous cultural jingles and sound effects. In this video, they perform a number of movie intro tunes (20th Century Fox, Paramount, etc.):
Watch until the end…the Netflix one is *kisses fingers*. Here they do the music from Super Mario Bros, including the overworld, underworld, and underwater themes:
Tetris (which gets unexpectedly dramatic):
And finally, a bunch of sounds and jingles from Microsoft Windows:
In June and July of 2020, Jason Reitman directed an at-home reenactment of the entirety of The Princess Bride featuring too many notable actors to list here. It ran in 10 installments on doomed streaming platform Quibi — which is why you probably haven’t heard of it — but it is fantastic. Mixed media, multiple actors playing all the roles, Fred Savage and Cary Elwes reprising their roles from the original, the star power & talent, the fact that they got permission to do it — it’s just so weird and good. You can watch the whole thing embedded above.
Ok, ok, here’s just a few of the actors who appear: Adam Sandler (as The Grandfather), Jon Hamm (Westley), Zoe Saldana (Buttercup), Penelope Cruz (Prince Humperdinck), Pedro Pascal (Inigo Montoya), Shaquille O’Neal (Fezzik), Charlize Theron (Fezzik), Andy Serkis (Count Rugen). And Carl Reiner as The Grandfather in his final onscreen role — he died just three days after recording his part.
I know you’re perhaps over the whole quarantine production thing, but this is worth checking out. This movie was done to raise money for José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, so if you enjoyed it, join me in sending them some money to enable their essential work. (via @mathowie)
Because the pandemic (mostly) shuttered US movie theaters for the duration of 2020 and studios reduced or redirected their output accordingly, you might be excused for thinking that it was a bad year for film. As David Ehrlich’s masterful video countdown of the 25 best films of 2020 demonstrates, there was plenty of good stuff out there if you knew where to look.
I didn’t end up seeing many of the films on Ehrlich’s list — I’ve been stuck rewatching old favorites and meaningless garbage during the pandemic — but I’m going to make some time for several of these soon. Two documentaries that I was surprised to see omitted: My Octopus Teacher and The Painter and the Thief. The latter is one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages — I can’t imagine that Ms. Americana (for instance) was better. And I’m Thinking of Ending Things? Did not do it for me at all. *shrug* (thx, brandt)
Just as the original Star Wars movie was inspired by Flash Gordon and Kurosawa,1 The Mandalorian is modelled on the western — a lone gunfighter makes his way through the wilderness to protect the innocent. As Mando star Pedro Pascal put it: “I think that George Lucas played with the Western undertones with the first movie, ‘Episode IV,’ and now they’re taking the suggestions of that tone and infusing it with steroids.” So naturally, it’s a great idea to make a trailer for The Mandalorian in the style of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, complete with music by Ennio Morricone. Il Mandaloriano!
Lucas made Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to do a Flash Gordon movie. Who knew that “Flash Gordon as a samurai film” would be such a lucrative idea?↩
DJ Earworm has made a chronological mix of songs, one from each year from 1970 to 2020.1 The Jackson 5 flows into Rod Stewart, Def Leppard into Milli Vanilli, Eric Clapton into Chumbawamba into The Verve, Shakira into Rihanna, and Ed Sheeran into Justin Bieber. Go on then, take a ride.
Ok, the title says “50 Songs from the Last 50 Years” but 1970 to 2020 is really 51 years (and therefore 51 songs). This is a common counting challenge, source of many off-by-one errors in software engineering. The way I learned to deal with it in grade school math class (and how I still think about it) is: are you counting fence posts or the gaps between them? So, a person born in 1970 turned 50 years old in 2020 but a song from each year from 1970 to 2020 totals 51 songs.
Anyway, I fudged the title to the nice round number of 50. I’m fun at parties!↩
Jumpei Mitsui, the youngest-ever Lego Certified Professional, has created a Lego version of Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The Great Wave is perhaps the most recognizable (and most covered) Japanese artwork in the world. Mitsui’s Lego rendering is composed of 50,000 pieces and took 400 hours to build. From Spoon & Tamago:
In ensuring that his 3D lego replica not only payed homage to the original but also captured the dynamics of crashing waves, Mitsui says he read several academic papers on giant wave formations, as well as spent hours on YouTube watching video of waves.
You can check out the Lego Great Wave in person at the Hankyu Brick Museum in Osaka.
For BBC Future, Sam Arbesman writes about “maps that plot alternative worlds to our own”.
These are the “what if” stories that ask us to imagine our world on a different path: what if a battle, election or assassination had gone the other way, or a pivotal person had never been born? Some of these stories involve time travel to make the change, but many alternate histories are simply imagined differences. What if the Nazis had not been beaten, as in the novel The Man in the High Castle, or what if the Soviets had landed a man on the Moon first, like in For All Mankind?
The map above was created by Andrew Shears and shows what the United States could have looked like if various state partition plans had come to fruition.
One of my favorite alternative history maps not covered by Arbesman is Melissa Gould’s Neu-York, a map of Manhattan after a hypothetical conquest of the United States by the Nazis in World War II (which I blogged about way back in 2003, when kottke.org had comments!)
See also Alternate Map of the Americas Features “Long Chile”.
This map of the lower 48 US states hand-drawn by XKCD’s Randall Munroe is super clever: 7 of the states are actually missing. Maybe the pandemic is starting continuing to rot my brain, but I stared at this for an embarrassingly long time before finding any of the absent states. Even now that I know which ones are gone, the map doesn’t look out of place at all. *claps*
I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to argue that much of the enduring success of Blade Runner comes down to how well the potent combination of the film’s score, created by electronic composer Vangelis, and the visuals instantly evoke, even in 2020, the future. Ok, a dystopian neo-noir future, but the future nonetheless. A YouTuber has reworked that score, along with ambient sounds and dialogue from the film, into a feature-length soundscape that, as Colin Marshall put it at Open Culture, “feels a great deal like watching Blade Runner without actually watching Blade Runner”. I think I’ll be listening to this as I work today. (via open culture)
I thought you could use a video of some fuzzy Tetris bricks that automagically ease/ooze into their proper places. That’s it. That’s the post. (via @Remember_Sarah)
Over on his Instagram, Raj Haldar is making modernist versions of book covers for children’s books. So far there’s Goodnight Moon, The Snowy Day, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Haldar’s own P Is For Pterodactyl, and a few others. Here’s what he says about Goodnight Moon:
Today, I’ve reduced ‘Goodnight Moon’ to nothing more than a few circles, rectangles, and triangles. What’s amazing, and a testament to how deeply this classic picture book is embedded in our collective consciousness is that even as a collection of the most simple forms, the cover is thoroughly recognizable.
(via print)
Under Pressure, the classic tune from David Bowie and Queen, seems like one of those songs you don’t want to mess with — we’re looking at you here, Vanilla Ice. But if someone is going to cover it, it might as well be Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Willie Nelson.
(via open culture)
Artist Ed Fairburn draws portraits of people and objects on top of maps and, well, it is just my exact cup of tea. His newest stuff is available on Instagram. I’ve featured his work twice before and it won’t be the last. (via colossal)
Back to the Future is 35 years old this year and to celebrate, Universal has cut together eight fan-made animations of action from the film into an abridged version of the beloved movie.
See also a deepfake version of BTTF with Tom Holland as Marty and Robert Downey Jr. as Doc.
Using an AI-based framework called Pixel2Style2Pixel and searching for faces in a dataset harvested from Flickr, Nathan Shipley made some more photorealistic faces for Pixar characters.
In response to a reader suggestion, Shipley fed the generated image for Dash back into the system and this happened:
I cannot tell where these images should live in the uncanny valley. You can see some similar experiments from Shipley here: a more realistic version of Miles from Spider-Verse, images of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera “reverse engineered” from paintings, and an image generated from a Rembrandt self-portrait.
Today’s good, clean, uncomplicated fun is right here in the form of this video - it does what it says on the tin.
See also the melodica version of the “welcome to Jurassic Park” scene. (via laura olin’s newsletter)
Update: I knew there was some similar M83 thing that I’d seen recently and was forgetting about: Midnight City but with Nelson Muntz laughing. (via @dansays)
This album cover was tweeted out the other day by Philip Glass’s official account with no additional comment. What really makes it IMO is the song titles listed at the bottom of the cover: Those Speedy Clouds, Escalators of Death, Run For It…Rockets Are Exploding All Over the Place!
I tried to track down who made this, but the only other instance I could find online was on Philip Glass’s Instagram exactly one year ago. Koyaanisqatsi is a serious work of art — it’s refreshing to see how playful Glass is about its representation. You could imagine other artists/musicians not being so chill about it.
Update: Aha, designer Cris Shapan made this. (via @jdpbbank)
Update: Here’s a short snippet of what this album might sound like.
After creating a series of music video mixes for the entire decade of the 80s (and 1979), the Hood Internet is back to take us through the 90s. Their first video, on 1990, features 60 different songs in only 3.5 minutes and is embedded above.
1990 was my last year of high school, so this is a total memory bomb for me. I listened to a lot of C & C Music Factory, Divinyls, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, En Vogue, Madonna, Mariah Carey, MC Hammer, Roxette, Salt-n-Pepa, Sinéad O’Connor, Whitney Houston, and missed whole scores of much cooler music that was unavailable to me because I lived in the middle of nowhere where the listening choices were country, heavy metal, or top 40. It’s an understatement to say that college was very musically eye-opening for me.
Update: Here are the installments from 1991, 1992, and 1993. Right into my college years and so hugely nostalgic.
Update: Here’s their 34-minute megamix of 600 songs from 1990-1999.
This playlist on Soundcloud has each year’s mix from 1975-1999 and there are also yearly playlists of all the songs used for these mixes on Spotify (scroll down to “Artist Playlists”).
In this experimental feature-length film that played at Cannes in 2012, director György Pálfi constructed a love story using clips from 450 films that span nearly the entire history of cinema. I was afraid this would be gimmicky, but it’s so well constructed and so smoothly adheres to the tropes of romantic movies that I got totally sucked in. It reminded me a lot of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour film made from hundreds (thousands?) of other movies and TV shows where the on-screen action is synced to the viewer’s time of day. (via waxy)
Study of the Creative Specimens is a collection of fantastical hybrid creatures created for Adobe’s 99U conference by Mark Brooks and illustration studio alademosca. Prints are available from Paper Chase Press. (via colossal)
These mashups of fine art with The Simpsons are entertaining, but this one featuring Bart Simpson’s iconic blackboard subtly replaced by Cy Twombly’s 1968 chalkboard drawing Untitled (New York City) — perhaps the ultimate “my kid could have done that” piece of modern art — is a little bit of genius.
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