We’re living in the true Golden Age of Television. “Breaking Bad,” “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” make great dramas of the past like “Hill Street Blues” or “The Rockford Files” look like a junior high drama club production. But as superior as things are today, don’t we need a new “Candid Camera?” Or “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes?”
Yeah, we’ve got “Impractical Jokers,” but you couldn’t find its network (TruTV) without the show’s cast coming to your house and tuning your cable box themselves.
If we had a popular show pulling pranks today, maybe we wouldn’t need Sony to put together this awesome hidden camera spectacle themselves, just to pimp last year’s remake of “Carrie.” Either way, watching a “telekinetic” teen freak out in a New York City coffee house is pretty epic – as are the reactions of shocked patrons.
Well played, Jimmy Kimmel, well played…
You can quibble all you want about whether or not you “knew” this supposed college student’s twerking video gone hellaciously wrong was fake or not when it hit YouTube last September. And make no mistake – Kimmel’s epic prank on the news media and the entire freakin’ Internet adds a whole extra layer of skepticism to everything we see – or think we see — online.
But do you know how hard it is to say you’re going to create a viral video, then actually pull it off? It’s a lot easier said than done. On that basis alone, it deserves a tip of the hat…
Laugh at Double Impact, Universal Soldier, Mortal Kombat and even the immortal Bloodsport all you want. Laugh at the legitimacy of his kick boxing career or his arguably paltry acting chops. Laugh at it all. Yeah, his action film resume is open to some heavy-duty mockability.
But there are two unquestionable truths about “The Muscles from Brussels” himself, Jean-Claude Van Damme that should sober your smug ass up.
Fact 1: He’s undoubtedly a bigger star than you and he could buy and sell you a hundred times over.
Fact 2: The guy did perfect splits while perched between two moving Volvo big rigs – at 53 years old. It’s one of the most amazing physical feats you’ll ever see. Eternal respect, dude…Street Fighter is forgiven. Seriously…
There are too many damn cameras everywhere.
You can’t pick your nose or pull your underwear out of your crack without video captures of the action almost automatically being uploaded to YouTube. Whether it’s a surveillance camera, a webcam or just somebody rolling with their iPhone, the unblinking eye is always there – and always watching. Ridicule celebrities all you want for their egos and excesses, but we’re with them on this: nobody would come off well with a TMZ camera in their face ever second of every day.
But without cameras rolling everywhere, we’d also miss some amazing sights. Like when a 10,000-ton meteorite explodes over central Russia last February and streaks across the sky like a Michael Bay production. Without all those traffic cams and dashboard cams and cellphone cams, we’d never have seen this reminder of how colossal and awe-inspiring our universe is. It’s almost worth the loss of any sense of personal privacy or civil liberty. Almost.
The mark of a true runaway smash viral video can be gaged in two ways. First, how many times must you immediately rewatch it to not only get all that you missed the first time, but simply to prolong the ecstatic experience? And finally, how quickly do you realize you’ll turn on, and eventually hate the same video once it’s…you know…EVERYWHERE?
Even as we doubled over at the furry-parade-gone-awok lunacy of “The Fox,” it didn’t even take one full play of Ylvis’ meditation on the speech patterns of the forest’s most mysterious residents that it became clear – “Oh my God, I’m gonna despise this video…like…tomorrow.”
Sure enough, within hours of its September debut, Norway’s answer to Flight of the Conchords were everywhere. And by the time the absolutely inevitable FOX TV network promos hijacked the tune for their own nefarious ends, the party was well and truly – hopelessly – over.
Still, you’ll never wonder again about what the fox says. Chacha-chacha-chacha chow, indeed.
