Embracing Bootleg Stuff
In 2011, at the tail end of summer, I watched Cowboys & Aliens while drinking a Marley’s Mellow Mood tea in the back row of the theater. While Cowboys & Aliens turned out to be a lackluster movie, I was nonetheless mesmerized that the likes of Jon Favreau, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde would come together to make a movie so obviously indebted to a kid’s toy stash. I remember being in this situation and maybe you do, too: I had my dad’s old cowboy toys and my mom had just picked up a few discount action figures at Target from a sci-fi movie no one cares about anymore (maybe Mars Attacks!) and then I got to spend the afternoon deciding what circumstances brought these two groups together.
When I stumbled upon the Facebook page Bootleg Stuff last year, I was excited to see over a hundred and fifty thousand people celebrating the weird, international manifestations of this open toy chest mindset. The Facebook page celebrates the unabashed and borderline illegal techniques of the companies who bring us fine products like this one (pictured left). The company that packages a juiced Darth Maul, C-3PO, and Buzz Lightyear, along with a lightsaber and a coffee-table-sized gun does not care one iota about cohesive cinematic universes or licensing agreements. This company only knows that I, a child of Late Capitalism, am predisposed to find happiness in an overly-enthusiastic Darth Maul, a beach-ready C-3PO, an obese Buzz Lightyear with bowlegged matchsticks for legs — and if they manage to put them all in one package, then they might just get my ten dollars.
The joy derived from Bootleg Stuff does not come from scrutinizing poorly-executed English translations as it would on other parts of the internet. When someone writes “Harry Potter Lifts Superman Storm” on a DVD featured on Bootleg Stuff, they damn well meant to write “Harry Potter Lifts Superman Storm.” It’s a direct translation. The joy, then, comes from imagining what exactly is on that disc. There is basically no wrong answer. Maybe this disc is a thinly-veiled DVD rip of both Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Man of Steel. Perhaps neither Harry Potter nor Superman show up at all. Perhaps it’s a collection of locally-made, low-budget action movies. But what about the “12 in 1”? What on earth can there be twelve of on this disk? This, my friends, is the magic of Bootleg Stuff.
The argument has been made convincingly in places such as The People Vs. George Lucas that, once a fictional universe reaches a certain level of popularity — such as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Toy Story — it is in the creator’s best interest to let fans do what they please with that universe. This certainly does not mean the creators have to fully cede what they’ve made, but in the public sharing of their world, they’ve insured that many people will linger in it and alter it. These people become citizens of that universe and the bootleg stuff they create is their crudest, most direct form of communication.
A creation like Bulba Fett (pictured left) is not an attempt, as some might believe, to distort the truth. I do not have to imagine a world where Pokémon and Star Wars are closely joined because I live in it, and interact daily with people whose personalities are, at least in part, tight bundles of Pokémon and Star Wars references.
To embrace bootleg stuff is to embrace companies all over the world who have no regard for copyright laws — no regard, even, for the advanced bootleg praxis I’m peddling here. They just want to grab my attention, and oh do they have my attention.
But these companies have not just captivated me, they’ve also entertained the 150,000+ people who “like” the Facebook page Bootleg Stuff. This community will no doubt continue to champion Bulba Fett, “Harry Potter Meets Superman Storm,” and other universe-blurring products for a long time to come. A lot longer, I would imagine, than these products likely should be publicized for a whole ‘nother galaxy of legal purposes.
