Gonads and strife: Two harmless and unrelated words that are only harmless and unrelated until you add a squirrel, an acoustic guitar, some meaningless lyrics and a singing voice on speed. Mix that all together and what you get is the ‘Gonads and Strife’ video, another addition to the dime-a-dozen Internet sensations that live on through word-of-AIM and mass email forwarding.
The Internet has changed a lot of things about communication and the media, but one of its most lovable qualities is that anyone with any crackpot idea can find a worldwide audience and the accompanying 15 minutes of fame, in no time.
The biggest benefactors of this phenomenon have been websites just like Gonads and Strife (www.threebrain.com/weeeeee.shtml), which are basically weird songs set to even weirder animations and videos.
These sites take on cult status, but soon enough everyone forgets about them and moves on to the new joke but not before us college kids get our kicks. Because it is the college kids, with our speedy Internet connections that make these websites so accessible, that help fuel these fads.
In addition to ‘Gonads and Strife’ and its squirrel that goes ‘Wee!’ are a slew of scary and ominous sci-fi web videos. The most popular of these is ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us,’ a long succession of images that makes fun of a poorly translated Japanese video game.
The story of ‘All your base’ (www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/index.shtml) deals with a Sega Genesis video game called ‘Zero Wing,’ whose subtitles contained such lines as ‘Somebody set us up the bomb,’ ‘You have no chance to survive make your time’ and, of course, the titular slogan.
Someone got the idea to take the game’s digitized voice and put throbbing techno beats behind it and then to use Photoshop to insert the ‘all your base are belong to us’ phrase into various snapshots of Americana-Budweiser ads, the Hollywood sign, cigarette warnings and O.J. Simpson’s mug shot.
The music, combined with the rapid cuts between the pictures, creates a frantic and funny piece that seems like some sort of trippy conspiracy theory.
Similar to ‘All your base’ is ‘The Terrible Secret of Space,’ which also turns a couple of robot phrases into an extended techno video filled with rapid cuts between images.
The main difference is that while ‘All your base’ is just silly, ‘The Terrible Secret’ (www.jonathonrobinson.com/3.0/web/webtsos.html) is just terrifying. Instead of pictures of McDonald’s billboards and Bill Gates, you’re getting graves, skeletons and the story of two robots’ struggles to kill humans and push them down staircases in order to protect them from the mysterious ‘terrible secret of space.’
But these Internet hot spots don’t all have to be about lengthy animations and bad techno. Recently, a bunch of sites have popped up that are so laugh-out-loud funny that you hope they are the bonafide real things instead of the brainchild of some unemployed, overweight, middle aged smart-ass.
Some of the most notable of these hysteria inducing websites are maddox.xmission.com- /irule.html, which grades and ferociously scrutinizes little kids’ crayon drawings, www.illmitch.com, the chronicles of a Russian-born rap star, and the creme de la creme of them all, www.blackpeopleloveus.com, which was recently attributed by the New York Times as being the sidesplittingly funny, un-politically correct project of a sibling stand-up comedy team.
The berserk superstar of cult websites might just be Randy Constan, otherwise known as the internet’s 49 year-old version of Peter Pan. Located at www.pixyland.org/peterpan, this freakish man-child purports to spread a message of tolerance and acceptance, with just a dash of pixie dust on the sidethe website was apparently created so Tinkerbell would have an easier time locating him.
Don’t think for a second that the happy-go-lucky ‘Peter Pan Man’ wastes any time before taking a firm stance on his Neverland soapbox: ‘Unfortunately this society has deified sexuality (and in particular male sexuality), and has made it into a god. So such a character, by his fairy-like qualities and appearance, represents a literal blaspheme against their ‘god.” In addition to this bizarre preaching, Constan uses his website as a springboard for merchandise and publicityfor just $25, you too can own a signed picture or a ‘Be a Pixie’ T-shirt.
All of these websites become entertaining when you look at them in their simplest form-as effective time-killers. COM senior Levi Maaia, who was so inspired by ‘All your base’ that he made his own T-shirts dedicated to the site, put it best.
”All your base’ and others like it are just funny one-liners. Once they get old, there is no rekindling the relationship the joke gets old and you forget why you thought it was funny in the first place.’
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