Culture Clash

Here is a great example of a culture mash-up.

Ewan Telford created Apocolypse OZ by taking the scripts from "Apocolypse Now" and "The Wizard of OZ," extracting dialogue from each, and creating a hybridized third script, which he then filmed.

It is a great short and I reccomend you see it if it's playing at a festival near you, which is possible because it has been picked up by many film festivals and is traveling all over the world. Either way it's worthwile to check out the trailer on the Apocalypse Oz site.

There have been a lot of mash-ups lately. Some more succesful (The Grey Album = The White Album, The Beetles + The Black Album, Jay-Z) than others (The Beachles = The Beatles + The Beach boys).

Let's hope other people follow Ewan's lead and create mash-ups from popular movie history. Only next I would like to see a sports movie mashup. What would be a good pairing with Chariots of Fire?

Maybe Spartacus? School Ties? Hoosiers?

Jimmy Chitwood could be a mashup of himself and the two runners from Chariots of Fire, Liddell (a Christian Scot) and Abrahams (a Jewish Englishman). And instead of the Indiana state championships the team would be going to the 1924 Summer Olympics. I would watch that.

And you know what would really be great, if you could watch "Chariots of Fire" with an entirely different score.

Why change the most memorable score of the last 25 years?

Listen to this.

If you haven't watched "Chariots of Fire" lately, you should simply to hear how poorly the synthesized music has aged in this movie. Last time I watched it I put it on mute and read the subtitles.

However, the score is remembered very fondly. How did this happen? I guess it's the whistle factor.

Amazingly "Vangelis" (his Greek name has 29 letters) won the academy award for the film score. Huh? What was going on in 1981? I'm not sure if this explains it, but "Bette Davis Eyes" was the number one single for the year.

I really like "Chariots of Fire" but I am going to wait until someone re-records the score without a synthesizer. It would add another 100 years to its shelf life. Moreover you could do this with thousands of movies from the 70s and 80s, the decades in which cocaine and synth collided.

Would you rewatch Teen Wolf scored by the RZA? What about the Pink Panther re-scored by Patrick Doyle? I would pay to see either one in the theatre.

Let's hope that catches on.