Tag: video

antelope tackling bicycle rider & bread helmet man

Apparently the viral video of the day is a bicycle rider getting knocked down by an antelope during a race in Africa.  It is quite unusual and unexpected. It was also unexpected to see it on TV twice already in one day.  But since it’s so popular, I’ll post it here for you, so you can tell all your friends and co-workers that you saw it and they should watch it too.  After all, this is what’s popular.  Maybe it’s even the cat’s pajamas…

Now don’t you feel cooler?  You are now in the know.  Although, by the time you’re reading this, this video might be old news.  There’s probably another video already gone viral that everyone is talking about.

Sometimes you can’t predict what will be viral next.  For example, someone can just show up to a protest with bread taped to their head and become an Internet meme.  He was just trying to “protect” himself against makeshift projectiles, so some protesters made makeshift “armor”.  Now this guy is known as Bread Helmet Man, and he’s appeared in “photographs” all around teh internets…  A few examples…

I wonder if he has any idea of his 15 megabytes of fame…

FYI, I already know the Bread Helmet Man meme is old (in Internet years, anyway).  But it was never referenced here, and it certainly is random, and the post just needed something else…  Was it worth your time?  Wait, don’t answer that.  Keeping up with viral videos and memes often isn’t worth your time, which is why they aren’t closely followed here…  And my rambling about wasting your time might not be worth your time, so I’ll stop typing now.

video of Soundwave breakdancing

Here is a cool video of Soundwave breakdancing — this is what you call doing the robot.  🙂  (If you don’t know, Soundwave was one of the Decepticons of Transformers lore; his Earth disguise mode was a jambox / cassette player.)

Supposedly this was initially put on YouTube in 2005, before YouTube was big, and it got to 15 million hits and crashed their servers.  I saw it back in 2004 on another site.  Think about that — at least 15 million hits, before YouTube was so popular.  That’s a lot of Transformers fans, even before Michael Bay’s “re-imagined”* the franchise for his movies.  Someone said it was made in 2002, and if so, that makes it even more impressive, because CGI was more difficult back then.

* Hey, I just found a soapbox!  I won’t go into the full rant, because I’ve done that before (and I’ve revisited it with video examples of how Transformers could’ve been better), but I will say this — the Transformers universe was very established through hundreds of cartoons and many comic books, and it was a good story with lots of backstory, many great plots, extensive character development — everything you need for a great movie.  Instead of using that, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg (yes, it’s partly his fault, too) made the movie about “a boy and his car”.  In doing so, they made Transformers be more about how a teenage boy has to save the world instead of the huge civil war going on between robots that are more intelligent than we are.  Instead of making what could’ve been one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever, with characters you admire for their principles and a philosophical side that gets you to thinking — while keeping the great action scenes, we ended up with just the action scenes and lots of explosions.  I’m not saying the movies weren’t entertaining at all, but I keep thinking what could’ve been…

LeBron James mashup video

Today on SportsCenter on ESPN was an audio/video mashup about LeBron James and the past year, starting with “The Decision” and going through the finals loss by the Miami Heat.  This is by DJ Steve Porter and is called “The Year of LeBron”.  It takes numerous video clips of LeBron talking about winning multiple championships mixed with him apologizing for not winning.  I like these kinds of remixes / mashups anyway, but because of the context of LeBron, it’s even better.

[Update: link fixed; ESPN link removed because it was changed.]

DJ Steve Porter has an official page on YouTube with other mashups, but for some reason this video isn’t on there yet.

live-action Japanese Spiderman from the ’70s

Recently I came across YouTube video clips of a live-action Japanese Spiderman TV show from the ’70s.  This is something to see… prepare to be surprised, even if you know quite a bit about Spiderman.

If you watched the video, you might’ve noticed it was from 1978 and it featured a giant live-action transforming robot.  How long did it take before America got transforming robots?  Something like 1984, wasn’t it?  The Japanese have been ahead of us for a while on cartoons and sci-fi technology.

According to this other video (with a different theme song, one you may be more familiar with), Spiderman has a flying car (the Spider Machine GP-7), and the giant transforming robot is named Leopardon and belongs to Spiderman.  The song says he has radioactive blood, and he wears some type of mechanical device on one of his wrists.  I’m really curious about the story now…

On a related note, someone took clips from the Japanese Spiderman TV show and made a compilation video, adding NES-style music from Mega Man.  (NES = the original Nintendo system, in case you didn’t know.)

Spiderman’s pre-fight antics look amusing, plus his voice in Japanese is awesome (“SPYDA!”).  I’m gonna have to watch one of those episodes sometime…