Okay I’ve watched this video five times in the last 12 hours.
I’ve known about Summer of Tears since we started AskANinja.com when we saw them at Comedy Cocktail, produced by the fabulous Jay Leggett and Amber J. I loved their stuff, and they’ve been doing solid sketch stuff for a while.
But they haven’t really broken out.
It took this video, which violates a lot of the common sense rules of making a financially successful online video: it completely infringes on copyrighted works, it had to be very expensive and time intensive to shoot, and it’s probably only a one off thing.
But.
It’s funny and it will get them noticed and appreciated way beyond the circle of fans they have now.
The investment in this video will generate enough heat to hopefully offset the time, energy and money to produce it.
And so it’s gotta be worth it for them. Sure they won’t be able to make this into a series, but maybe they’ll be able to get a development deal somewhere or sell another idea off of the attention.
This is how you break the rules. Massively and unapologetically. Going in knowing that no one will ever be able to sell anything off of it. Shows like Yatch Rock and House of Cosbys have blazed this path before to Hollywood success. I hope that Summer of Tears follows.
Good luck and nice work.
8 Comments
August 16, 2008 at 6:45 pm
funny stuff indeed….and it looked really good…
August 16, 2008 at 10:38 pm
It really is interesting to take something well known in a genre and give it a spin.
August 17, 2008 at 1:38 am
Ok that was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages. The timing of those gags was perfect. Comedy genius!
Thanks for highlighting summer of tears.
August 17, 2008 at 10:31 am
[...] tip to Kent Nichols for tipping me off to Summer of Tears’ genius send-up of Michael J. Fox’s 1985 movie [...]
August 17, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Not to be contrarian, but I’m wondering where the genius of this video is. The bowling-ball-in-the-back bit was kind of funny as slapstick, but everything else seemed like the most obvious jokes you could make about the movie.
Am I missing something?
August 17, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I hope this isn’t a one-off thing. I’d love to see these guys do this with other 80’s movies. Think of it: Tron, Never-Ending Story, Big, TeenWolf Too, etc. The series would be amazing.
August 19, 2008 at 7:51 am
[...] see exactly how dumb, and laugh a lot in the process, watch the below video. I found it linked on Kent Nichols’ blog (of Ask A Ninja fame). I’ll let him explain: Okay I’ve watched this video five times in the [...]
November 20, 2008 at 4:37 am
yeyeyeye mashitrightup lol. piracy. assaulting the device head on.
BTW, the trick with video & comments is to avoid the page refresh, since that recaches the plugin objects, recaches the flash usually. so if you post, you restart the video. If you put videos on pages, good idea to re-do the comment script.