Comedy Repeating Itself: The Art of the Trailer Mashup

One man’s journey to overcome the death of his wife leads him to forge a bond with a directionless young boy. This is the heartwarming tale of…George Costanza? Yes. Yes it is. Earlier this week, some hilarious genius gave us the trailer to George:

It got me thinking about some of the first trailer mash-ups I remember seeing.  Like…

and…

In this day and age, a decent editing program and a functional sense of humor is all you need to turn any movie or TV show that’s ever been into any movie or TV show you want it to be. The very notion of a mash-up is a celebration of deconstructionism, post-modernism and probably 3 or 4 other isms. Happens in pop music all the time, like Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or the new Beatles/Wu-Tang album brilliantly titled Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. The mash-up craze has yet to fully bleed over into literature, although Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a pretty good start. How about an Updike/Ayn Rand Rabbit Shrugged, or a Mailer/Burroughs The Naked and the Lunch? I’ll stop. And like any good cultural phenomenon, there are nuanced subdivisions to be noted within the movie mash-up world: –The Genre Flip: take a serious movie and cut it like a silly movie or vice versa Sleepless in Seattle Mary Poppins Dumb and Dumber Office Space Toy Story –The Movie Meld: take the audio of one movie and the video of a disparate movie, then jam them in a blender and drink the hilarious juice of juxtaposition Brokeback to the Future 10 things I Hate About Commandments Reservoir Dogs/Ninja Turtles Kill Bill/Beauty and the Beast You Got Served/Wizard of Oz Needless to say, there are entire sites dedicated to this post-modern tomfoolery. So go out there and get mashed! Up! That was weird. (Watching George, I had the thought: What happens when future generations of media consumers happen upon these movie mash-ups before the movies themselves? Will their frame of reference be completely reversed? Will they one day see a re-run of Seinfeld and say "Hey – it’s that guy from the heartwarming drama George! I didn’t know they made a spin-off series. Strange that it’s a sitcom." And we’ll laugh. And then we’ll weep.)