Whenever I hear the word “mash-up”, I reach for my revolver

Virality, here we come! Counting down the twenty-five worst mash-ups-cum-memes of all time:

25. Hitler’s rant in Downfall re-subtitled with a speech by Josef Stalin

24. The cast of Mama’s Family drawn as the cast of Growing Pains

23. The cast of Growing Pains drawn as the cast of Mama’s Family

22. IRS form 1040 Schedule A drawn as IRS form 1040 Schedule B

21. The domain of natural numbers drawn as the domain of irrational numbers

20. Crossover fan fiction between Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice

19. Pride and Prejudice and Tax Accountants

18. Pride and Prejudice and Sensibility

17. Pride and Prejudice

16. Being and Time as if written by Immanuel Kant

15. Being and Time as if written by Martin Heidegger, but in a comedy French accent

14. Being and Time

13. Hamlet as if written by Francis Bacon/[alternate selection] Hamlet as if written by William Shakespeare

12. Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men, Hulk, Spider-Man as if created by Stan Lee

11. Manga and other comics and comic strips as if created without an uncredited staff of quote-assistants-unquote

10. Damien Hirst

9. Modernism as if postmodernism

8. This list as if your mom

7. As if

6. Garfield without dialogue, Garfield, Jon, Odie, Jon’s supposed girlfriend, any other characters objects or places, panel borders, panels, lines, art, language, shapes, space, time, being, non-being, non-non-being, lasagne, Mondays or that one girl cat that was Garfield’s girlfriend

5. This space intentionally left blank

4. Humour in the form of lists, alleged humour in the form of lists, self-referential alleged humour in the form of lists, physician troll thyself,

3. humour in the form of flowcharts, 99% of webcomics, any blog that turns into a book deal, Boing Boing, Deviantart, Metafilter, 4chan, tumblr, Know your “meme”, TV Tropes,

2. actually, let’s just say the entire fucking internet

1. And, finally, ninja pirates who turn into gorilla werewolves riding skateboards with the robot head of zombie Abraham Lincoln and they’re also MODOKS mashed up with the cast of Lost dressed as the Beatles drawn as kittens dressed in oversized ALF suits rendered in LEGO if LEGO were an 8-bit Nintendo game in Victorian Steampunk times as a minimalist poster of a vintage paperback

Also, Cthulu is involved somehow.

…Oh no wait you guys #1 is the most quote AWESOME unquote idea ever AMIRITE

Image attribution: Dan Clowes, Eightball #4

21 thoughts on “Whenever I hear the word “mash-up”, I reach for my revolver

  1. Careful- if anyone at ComicsAlliance sees #1, they’ll have an immediate, uncontrollable orgasm.

  2. Sir, I’m afraid I’m not familiar with this mashed-up concept. Please elaborate.

  3. How about “Comics criticism as if written by those skinny guys in the Identity Studies major”? I’m disappointed that didn’t make the list.

  4. 4. Humour in the form of lists, alleged humour in the form of lists, self-referential alleged humour in the form of lists, physician troll thyself,

    Haha.

    As with any type of art, there are good and bad examples of the form. I love David Wong at cracked.com, for instance.

  5. 1) This was really funny — especially #8 and #7.
    2) Mash-ups deserve some respect. Darwinism (love it or hate it) is a mash-up, as natural selection and mutation had already been posited. Rock and roll is a mash-up. Macaroni and cheese is a mash-up. Your smartphone is a mash-up (okay, that might have hurt my argument). Anyway, they’re not all bad. Some things may turn out like barbecue chicken pizza, but others turn out like alt-country, southern rock, and gangstagrass.

  6. this isn’t a cracked article without a shrill, elaborate prison rape analogy (preferably in reference to inconvenient consumer electronics, or precious untouchable 90s media property getting a reboot)

  7. Noah, I equivocally concur; much of it does. At the end, I was trying to be ambiguous about which of my contrasting examples were good and bad. Unfortunately, I think “southern rock” visibly tilted the scale — or maybe barbecue chicken pizza did, but isn’t someone eating it? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who does, but I assumed they must exist, and in some numbers.
    Anyway, there are apparently limits to the precept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some things are clearly great, and some things are barbecue chicken pizza.

  8. Jones, aren’t you Australian? Why do you know about IRS forms? Are you a spy, trying to infiltrate the comics blogging corner of the American internet(s)?

    Bee Tee Dubs, I also enjoy musical mashups (Beastles 4 life!), but good god has this crap gotten tiresome. #1 is a great expression of that obnoxiousness that has taken over so much of internet “humor”, or just what people think is cool, like “minimalist” design or whatever. I’m so fucking sick of “some recognizable thing in the style of some other recognizable thing”. Look, it’s Darth Vader as Scarface! Hey, Jake and Finn from Adventure Time dressed up as Vincent and Jules from Pulp Fiction! Wow, an entire fucking generation can’t come up with anything original, just stupid combinations of other ideas! Society deserves a swift death!

    I like #12 though, that’s a good joke.

  9. Matt (B): it was going to be marsupials drawn as monotremes, but I adapted it for a more general audience.

    The thing with those PopCultA as PopCultB mash-ups is…you can easily see the incentives at work. You draw your own stuff, no one’s interested. You draw My Little Ponies recreating the Abu Ghraib photos and bang! you get a zillion pageviews. (Hard to believe, however, that any of that interest carries over to your other, original work).

    Personally, I would love to read Heidegger writing Being and Time in a comedy French accent. “Sacre bleu! Das nichts, ‘ow you say, zey nichtet…”

  10. “Hard to believe, however, that any of that interest carries over to your other, original work.”

    Speaking as a site that got a ton of page views out of a mash up…any publicity is good publicity.

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