#Paul Teharr

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 64 - Gollum Rap / Mashed Taters / They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard

So, as I like to observe here on FLASHBack, popular movies were rich sources of meme-fodder for Flash Animators of the early web. And while the Matrix Trilogy was the clear king of the references, there's another trilogy that's not far behind: The Lord of the Rings. Previously, I've mentioned Legendary Frog's series The One Ring, as well as the Two Towers themed version of Badger, Badger, Badger that Weebl put out. Today, we'll be looking at three other animations, starting with Gollum Rap (The Towers Are the Players), uploaded to AlbinoBlacksheep on 02 December 2003 by Ned Evett and Paul Teharr.   The Flash depicts Gollum as a Nike hat wearing rapper with The One Ring as his neck chain bling. He is backed up by the Isengard Orc, Snaga, who is wearing a red bandanna Tupac-style. In Peter Jackson's films, Snaga is beheaded and eaten by Saruman's Uruk-Hai, but in the original novels, he was a scout who was part of the company of Orcs who captured Merry and Pippin and brought them to Isengard (more on this later). Evett and Teharr weren't the first in 2003 to look at Gollum and think "well of course he's a rapper" -- earlier in the year on 18 Feburary 2003, a nerdcore group called Lords of the Rhymes put out a video for their self titled hit track. While not animated, and distributed in QuickTime and not Flash, it did feature Gollum not just rapping, but dropping some pretty sick beatboxing alongside some soundbites from the Rankin-Bass animated adaptations of Tolkien's works.

  Getting back to Flash, on 18 August 2004, eNiGMa the MoNKey uploaded Mashed Taters. An early example of the phenomenon that TV Tropes would eventually name the "Stupid Statement Dance Mix", this catchy song went hugely viral. In addition to the images of Sam and Gollum from the movie The Two Towers, there's also a demented looking potato that was ripped from an earlier Flash Animation by Weebl, called Potato. At the end of that animation, one of the potatoes is sliced up into a bunch of french fries, or as they call them in the UK, "Chips", which one of the subsequent slices cheerfully exclaims, in contrast to the "Potato Potato Potato" that the potatoes had been chanting, minion-like, previously. (I say "minion-like" but Weebl's animation pre-dates Despicable Me by over half a decade; perhaps it was the inspiration for Minionspeak?) And while the song Mashed Taters doesn't use any of Sam's lines about chips from the movie in its lyrics (choosing to mash the potato with a fist in original animation instead of reusing Weebl's knife to chop it into chips), the game Lego: The Hobbit from 2014, features a sidequest, "Culinary Curiosity", where you can help a Rivendell elf who wants to make chips. All you have to do is find him a fabled Po-Tay-To, and when you turn it in, he comments that if he had more, he could boil them, mash them, and stick them in a stew.   As memetic as it was, when it comes to Lord of the Rings Stupid Statement Dance Mixes, Mashed Taters would turn out to be merely the opening act. On 16 August 2005, Erwin Beekveld released They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard on AlbinoBlacksheep. In The Two Towers, Aragorn asks Legolas "What do your elf eyes see?" and Beekveld, in a fit of mad genius, decided that the elf's response not only would make a bangin song hook but also needed to be backed up by a rendition of Howard Shore's iconic Lord of the Rings Score played on the noblest of instruments, the kazoo. The resulting masterpiece was the meme equivalent of crack laced with meth with an oxycontin chaser.   Beekveld's work inspired many other creators. There's this animated version by Fernando Donini Ramos, which I don't know for certain if it was animated in flash, but if it wasn't it certainly could have been (and as a bonus, here's an animation of the white gray wizard I teased two weeks ago). The song's gotten a Nightcore Remix (with some silly art of Legolas with his dad Thranduil). Here's another animated version that's an excellent example of rotoscoping. Luke Warm Studios did a version in stop motion Lego. The Dread Crew of Oddwood performed the song live at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in 2010. However, perhaps the most watched derivative work, with nearly 9.7 million views (even with its potato quality of 240p resolution), would be this video uploaded by some guy named Peter Jackson who was getting drunk with his friend Orlando Bloom and got the bright idea of recording him singing along to the original video as it plays on a tablet.   So I think we've tarried long enough in New Zealand Middle Earth. Let us go Into The West. How far West? All the way to Nevada, for one last time.