“Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal”, Pablo Picasso may have said that. Maybe it was T.S. Eliot. Maybe it was a guy who mangled a quote from another guy and attributed it to T.S. Eliot while yet another guy said it all the time and he attributed it to Picasso. (There’s an essay about that quotation here. Seriously, I had always thought that Picasso said that.)
The point is not whether this guy or that guy quoted that other guy accurately. The point is dealing with what was said.
I’m sure you’ve already seen this little piece here:
This pretty much demonstrates that Disney has no compunction about making derivative works from its derivative works. We knew that, though.
It’s just weird to see all of that put out there *BAM* right there in front of you. I see something like that and my jaw drops. I also think about stuff like the internet and how that will make such things much more difficult in the future. When you have pretty much *EVERYTHING* at your fingertips (information-wise, anyway), how much more difficult will it be to find something obscure and borrow/steal it and otherwise remix it?
Which brings me to this video here that you should watch. It does the same as the above… only with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Watch this and be blown away.
So that’s my recommendation for you this week.
There’s a difference between stealing and homage.
And there’s a reason that everyone loves Indiana Jones and nobody remembers Disney’s Robin Hood.
Watching that second youtube still irritates me, though. I can’t put my finger on why.
IIRC, George Lucas made no bones at all about wanting to re-create the old Saturday serials with Indiana Jones. And there’s also good narrative, cinematographic, and practical reasons for doing some of those shots that way.
The shot-for-shot parallels are a little bit eerie, though. Did they even find the same mountain for the fade-in?
I appreciate that there’s only so many ways to block a shot of people walking. I do.
It’s just… weird.
This is like the Movie Version of the great post that introduced me to One eskimO.
The difference, for me at least, is that when someone covers a song and does it well, they make the song their own. (And, in the case of One eskimO, they took a sample and it felt like they built a completely new song out of the recongizable pieces of the originals.)
This feels like… something else.
But a story. A few years back, Michelle Branch and Counting Crows, I think it was, came out with a cover of “Big Yellow Taxi”. We were eating with a friend who recognized the song and said, loudly, “They’re covering Amy Grant now???” (Before you ask: Yes, he meant it.)
Maybe my seeing Raiders as having done something different from covering a song is me being boneheaded in the same way as my buddy was.
> This feels like… something else.
I need to write a post about this. Hey can anyone summon an extra 10 hours for me to do stuff today?