The Best of the Internet, Feat. Bad Lip Reading
Re-dubbing is always quite funny, and quite subversive
In 1966, there was a movie named What’s Up Tiger Lily. This was a Woody Allen film, but he didn’t actually have anything to do with shooting it. Instead, he took a time honored tradition of re-dubbing foreign films for a domestic, English speaking market to the H-N-L. Before, folks would translate the original foreign language directly, and then try, often with unintentionally hilarious results, to match the voice and the emotion in the voice to what was going on in the movie.
Allen switched up the formula- He bought the rights to a Japanese spy film. The movie had all the elements that one would be familiar with- People getting shot, explosions, sneaking around, some degree of hinted-at sex and all that sort of thing. When he brought the film back to the States, he rewrote the script, turning it into a comedy, hired some people, and had them read the lines, as if it were the re-dubbed foreign film, and as if these characters were actually saying these bizarre lines. The film was a touch absurdist and a bit off-color, but it certainly was funny. It is one of Allen’s lesser known movies, I would say, but it is worth a watch if you like these wacky concept films.
Fast forward to early 2011. MTV had long stopped playing music videos. Consequently, music artists had begun promoting their music videos via online channels like YouTube. One such artist was Rebecca Black. This young woman really wanted to be a musician, and her parents decided to support her. They paid for a song, a producer and a video, and then they uploaded it to YouTube. Now- Rebecca Black instantly became (in)famous, as her video for the song “Friday” went completely viral. Problem was- the music was terrible and the video really was laughable! And people who were watching the video were laughing AT her dreams, rather than really getting into the tune.
Her video, according to Wikipedia was one of the ten most viewed videos ever on YouTube and according to the dude who did MST3K and Rifftracks called it the “Worst Video Ever Made”. It also earned Black the dubious distinction of one of the five most “Disliked” videos on Youtube. But it was quickly taken down, after receiving more than 60 million views, due to contract disputes with the producer. (Of course there were disputes with the producer and the label AFTER it became one of the most disliked videos in YouTube history!) Despite the fame for the wrong reason, I am happy to say, at least that Rebecca Black is still at it, doing what she likes doing, is still making music and has improved significantly. I am happy to post her YouTube Page’s link here, and wish her the best in her career.
Though the original video was removed, we were not done with “Friday”. Soon after the viral explosion of Black’s video, a mysterious, shadowy figure under the handle Bad Lip Reading (or BLR for short) got ahold of it, and following Woody Allen’s lead from 45 years ago, completely replaced the sound track of the video, while keeping the video itself intact. The result was a song which, while not actually much better than the original, was at last intentionally hilarious. It was called “Gang Fight.” In the song, the character in the video (unwittingly played by Black herself) is the leader of a youth gang who are going to a party to eat… chicken?
BLR deviated from Allen’s process in that he (we know it was a he, we just don’t know who he is, to this date) attempted to match the lip movements of the various singers featured in the parodies, to real words. The premise was that if you were a lip reader, but not very good at it, you would completely misunderstand what some person was saying, and the message would be garbled and probably pretty funny. The result was often just as bizarre as “What’s Up, Tiger Lily” and quite a bit more enjoyable.
BLR began by focusing on music videos. He did Black’s video, a Coldplay video called Yeti, a weird Ludacris/Bee Gee’s collaboration called “Magic Man”, a Justin Bieber/ Rascal Flats duet called “Hot Jumping Beans”, a Michael Bublé video named “Russian Unicorn”(which Bublé himself praised, calling it “honestly the coolest thing I have ever not been a part of”!) and an early Miley Cyrus drug track called “Black Umbrella” featuring Snoop Dogg, which presciently anticipated Cyrus’ jump to a more controversial stage in her career. Over all, he re-dubbed nearly 2 dozen music videos, writing entirely new songs to go along with the moving pictures.
These videos were clearly labors of love- they were not designed to mock the original, but to build off the excellent visuals and the familiar image of the original artist. The producer actually made great music to go along with these videos, and the voice actors who sang the tracks were fully committed. But BLR’s work was not without controversy. At least one record company filed DCMA complaints to YouTube against two of BLR’s videos- One- a video by Will.I.Am and Nikki Minaj which BLR called “Dirty Spaceman” which fans have struggled to keep up on YouTube despite the copyright claim, (and which has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary; Miley Cyrus’ Black Umbrella is also listed in the Urban Dictionary) and another by Taylor Swift and Wiz Khalifa, the classic “Rockin’ All Night Long” which was unavailable for a very long time.
“(Rockin’)” represented the pinnacle of BLR’s music production, and has been widely hailed as a song which transcended the humor market it was born in. It could easily be a song you could hear on the radio. And this was years before TayTay jumped the country music ship and headed to electro pop world where she could (and should) theoretically make this song for real. The insistence of her early country fans that she never would do this kind of music is ridiculous now, in hindsight.
In 2012, BLR stopped doing music videos, and switched to political re-dubbing. Some of the funnier ones include political commercials from folks like Herman Cain, a send-up of Beyoncé’s National Anthem at Obama’s second inauguration, and from the 2016 Primary, Ted Cruz’s commercials. BLR has also branched out to the inane running commentary of NFL players and coaches, movies, whole seasons of reality TV and entire series’ of scripted TV. They have even completely altered the premise of some, turning “Game of Thrones” into a Medieval Theme Park filled with complete losers, the “Return of the Jedi” as retro-futuristic track called “It’s not the Future,” and “The Avengers” into a southern themed night-time soap opera called “Tulsa Nights”.
BLR is still releasing videos now, 6 years on, with more than 6 million subscribers and over 800 million views. BLR has also inspired other re-dubbing on YouTube. There are a lot of imitators, which I won’t link here, because their work is often not as funny, but then there are others, like Peter Serafinowicz’ Sassy Trump series which take re-dubbing to the H-N-L yet again.
And so, without further ado, let me present my favorite BLR video of all time, Taylor Swift’s “(Rockin’) All Night Long” featuring Wiz Khalifa, recently restored to YouTube in full glory, somehow, by some user known as The User That Mirrors. Get it quick before it goes away again.
