This might be my favorite intro video yet. The energy I feel from it is about at the same level as the September 2009 video we made, the first “serious” one. A lot of stuff just fell into the right place.

The first video, “Lord and Lady Douchebag”, is, besides one of the funniest SNL skits I have ever seen, a great satire on notions of tradition, language, and conceptual inheritance. Because my grandmother recently passed, I’d been thinking a lot about tradition, and what family means, and this video hit home in every way possible. Where do objects and ideas get their names? What do names and words even mean? This gets really Matrix-y when you think about it for a while, which is why I feel it’s really important to poke fun at it. After all, if you get too wrapped up in rules, tradition, and regulation, first you start battles, then you forget what they were about in the first place.

The second video was partly me trolling the whole audience of 5MoF, and partly a satire on war (isn’t that what Star Wars is about?). I felt this would reach a lot of people, because it is, to quote a friend, “a female chewbacca taking cooking lessons”. And with this, I can say that I made Noisebridge watch an entire segment of the Star Wars Holiday Special, a film so forbidden that even George Lucas disavows it.

There is a brief message with a “disclaimer”. It actually opens with the words “FOR MADMEN ONLY”, which I took from the Herman Hesse book Steppenwolf. I won’t give too much away about that, but Steppenwolf is an amazing exploration of the multiple selves within oneself. Then it continues with message warning people about potentially intense graphic images, where I tried to imitate Vonnegut’s writing style as much as possible. And of course, the mention of Kilgore Trout, so that if someone saw the video and wanted to know more, they would be able to ask “Who is Kilgore Trout?”

The final video is one of the first “experiment” pieces we’ve done. This started out with me thinking “Wow, I want to find a short film version of Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ and show it to the audience, because it’s such a great story. I mean, I was raised on Vonnegut. But after looking through a good half dozen videos, I couldn’t find anything good enough. It would either be true to the story (and thus not make sense to people who hadn’t read it), or depart enough that it lost its meaning. So I had to look to a more general theme, when I found a “video” of Vonnegut narrating one of my favorite pieces, the opening chapter to ‘Breakfast of Champions’. I then decided that we needed to create our own video, and found a video with images from the Manhattan Project and WW2 that fit perfectly with it. It wound up being an amazing juxtaposition of satire of war against the ill effects of war.

Structure without question leads to war without purpose, which leads to needless harm and death. That’s really the whole point of this, which is why the ending of Dr. Strangelove was so perfect. I’m a huge Kubrick fan, and ending with this 5MoF logo sequence sealed the deal. E Pluribus Unum.