Of monkeys and movie trailer recuts

My friends have somehow gotten the notion that I have a thing for monkeys. It started, apparently, with the naming of this blog. The reason why I chose this name is given in my first official post,* and has as much to do with actual monkeys as Schrödinger's Cat has to do with actual cats. But that hasn't stopped friends and relatives from getting me monkey-themed gifts and knickknacks, including stuffed animals, plastic and resin figurines, and Nick & Nora Sock Monkey flannel bedsheets. One figurine stands atop my monitor at this moment. It's a monkey cowboy from a dollar store, about six inches tall, and in the fashion of such third-world manufactured items found in dollar stores it is incredibly detailed and meticulously painted.

I would love to be able to find a similar figurine (at a similar price) of a monkey using a typewriter. Every once in a while I will do a Google search for the terms monkey typewriter figurine and see what sort of hits I get. Every time I this photo repeated over and over:

Today I clicked through to one of the linked sites featuring this image and found this blog entry on John's Entertainment News Blog from two years ago:

Coming Attractions
It's that time of year again where studios release their serious work to be considered for Oscar voting. So as a way of taking a break from all of that, I thought we'd focus on something a little more comedic but with a hint of seriousness. In an earlier post I took a jab at the Internet comparing it to a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters. Well, occasionally those monkeys come up with some good stuff and give us access to previously untapped levels of creativity. One such example is the recut movie trailer. This is where people take clips and make a movie trailer that makes the film appear as if it is from a totally different genre. YouTube is full of such efforts and below are my favorites.

Unfortunately, with the passage of two years the free-speech-hating anti-parody legal goons have quashed several of the clips in this post, including the thriller version of Office Space and the teen high school comedy version of The Ten Commandments. But a few others are still functional, including the warm-hearted family comedy Shining, about a father and son growing closer during a Winter caretaking stint at the Overlook Hotel.

Check out the other survivors on the original post, before they get erased as well!


*Which was technically my second post; the original text of this post just said "Coming soon!" for the better part of a day, but was overwritten with this post - so in a sense, my first post is actually lost!