Re-mediated Movie Trailers

Remediation is a term typically applied to the environment or education domains. In the former, it refers to removing pollutants from contaminated soil. In the latter, remediation is the extra attention given to students to correct perceived problems. The term is about correcting a fault. However, it is also used in some tech circles to indicate re-use to create new meaning as both an homage to and critique of earlier media. In their 2000 book, Jay David Bolter (Georgia Tech) and Richard Grusin (Wayne State) offered a theory of mediation for the digital age that shows this is a recurring activity. For example, photography remediated painting, and film remediated theatre.

About a year ago, some amateurs started publishing remediated videos on YouTube. They took existing movie trailers and re-edited them with different background music, custom voiceovers and interstitial text to tell a much different story than what the movie was actually about. The first of these to pass through my email in-box was a recut of The Shining, Stephen King’s horror novel turned Jack Nicholson vehicle about a mad, murderous writer. The remediation turned it into a feel-good discovery film about relationships, complete with a Peter Gabriel soundtrack. Others soon followed, until there was a library of about a dozen or so movies that had been remediated in this manner.

They aren’t all winners. For some of the mocks, the storytelling is not very concise, certainly not trailer length. For others, the quality of the voice over—both the sound of the voice and the choice of words—is clearly amateur, taking away from the believability of the reinterpreted trailer. While most stick with the material from the film, some mashup several films (see, Titanic 2) to craft the desired story. The creativity is largely limited to flip-flopping horror and comedy genres.

Here’s a list of remediated movie trailers to compare, most of which were published around the same time last year:

1. The Shining
2. Sleepless In Seattle
3. When Harry Met Sally
4. Mary Poppins
5. Office Space and Office Space
6. Top Gun
7. Taxi Driver
8. Garden State
9. Big
10. Toy Story
11. Ten Commandments
12. The Lion King
13. Silence of the Lambs
14. Titanic (among others)
15. American Pie
16. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
17. The Matrix (sort of weak)
18. Wedding Crashers(a bit weak, too)
19. Dumb and Dumber (trailers shouldn’t be 4 minutes)
20. Back to the Future (amateur voice over)

Remediation is a rare, but not unusual technique in the art of modern storytelling. In a special reunion episode “The Five Doctors,” Doctor Who used past footage of Tom Baker, a popular version of the lead character who refused to join the new storyline. Sometimes, old footage becomes key to the new plots. The 1999 Steven Soderbergh film, The Limey, made use of a a 32-year-old film with star Terrence Stamp—Poor Cow—to show flashbacks of a younger Stamp to advance the plot of the modern movie. The Star Trek television series created a Deep Space Nine episode based on a recut and augmentation of the popular original series episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Sequels often re-cast characters, re-use sets or make cultural references to the previous incarnation.

In 1991, Diet Coke broke some advertising ground by having Elton John croon to some dead Hollywood stars through remediation of film footage. That spawned a sequel by Coca Cola and eventually led to interest in the technology that earned Academy Awards for Forrest Gump and allowed Fred Astaire to dance with a Dirt Devil during a Super Bowl. Although few people were up-in-arms when Apple Computers created their “Think Different” poster campaign—which featured famous photos of human icons—this remediation of movie footage caused quite a bit of debate from those who feared darker uses. Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. endorsing sleeping pills. Remediation of movie trailers is done for comedic effect (even when turning the genre into horror) because we understand the context of the original movie and why the new interpretation is inaccurate. However, just like the fear of dead celebrities having their recorded words used in unintended ways, the YouTube remediation projects are also a reminder that video is just material for future creation and message making.