9 Gets Mashed Up

As a Labor Day weekend treat, FilmInFocus explores what happens when 9 bumps heads with other movies.

When 9 star Elijah Wood was recently on G4’s Attack of the Show, he presented a little video that he and producer Timur Bekmambetov had made to promote the movie. Watching it made us think that it would be fun to look at all the other videos out there on the web that riffed on the movie, so we went out and did a little digging. Excitingly, it turns out that YouTube is positively a hotbed of user generated content inspired by the movie, so we decided to present some of our favorites. Like the Wood-Bekmambetov collaboration, these videos are all great fun, but achieve that not with a big budget but just a clever idea and some nifty editing skills.  

In the past couple of years, largely due to the emergence of YouTube, the video mashup has really come of age. Taking its inspiration from the musical mashup – most notably DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album, which blended the Beatles’ The White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album – the video mashup has taken two (or more) improbable films and shown us what happens when the two collide. Viral hits like Must Love Jaws (Jaws meets Must Love Dogs) and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments (10 Things I Hate About You crossed with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments) have shown that the form can be taken to amazingly creative heights. 

We kick off our selections with “Hysterical Hitler,” which is brilliant, yet unbelievably simple: a very fun little mashup of Hitler (from Inglourious Basterds) getting angry, and the title card from a Russian TV spot from 9. This is totally inspired, and is a big hit in the FilmInFocus offices. What could be more fitting than making bedfellows of a film about fascism and a film which shows the apocalyptic impact of a fascist regime? 

 

The next video is a musical interlude of sorts, in which 9 is mashed up with the song “Jack’s Obsession” from The Nightmare Before Christmas. (The movie geeks among you may have noted that both movies were produced by Tim Burton.) Explaining the origin of the video, YouTube user BeaverAru says, “Ah, the things insomnia makes me do. It's now 3 in the morning, and thanks to my usual refusal to sleep until about 5, I needed something to entertain myself.” 

Click here to view.

Continuing the musical theme, we come to an inspired little video, “2’s Hypnotic Rave,” which transforms the normally very prudish 2 into a raver by cleverly repeating certain movements – thus turning them into dance moves – and adding strobe lighting and a thumping techno score. 

Click here to view.

Though titled “When a 9 fan is bored,” the final video is, in fact, more like an antidote to boredom. A collection of 9-inspired clips, it begins with a smartly edited mashup of 9 with District 9. Unlike a lot of trailers that are reworked as other trailers, the video’s creator, MokynRambling, finds visuals that really matches up with the audio to great effect. 

Click here to view.

If you have any favorite 9 mashups, let us know about them in the comments section below.