Yoshi!
Where's the lookout?!
In the past year, I’ve noticed an increased presence on the hell-o-sphere utilizing the early MIDI capabilities of Mario Paint,
The game, designed for the Super Nintendo Sytem, was an ‘application-type’ game that was one of the first to enable mouse control of musical notes one might place in the hilarious compositional interface, or, even cooler, to utilize primitive stop-animation capacities.
Enter Hunter Fairstone (www.roxpeen.blip.tv) a friend and undergraduate film student at Hampshire College who conceived of the idea during his machinima class of subverting one of those most canonized, sacrosanct scenes from film history, the “Odessa Steps” from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Using nothing but Mario Paint and a deep-seated love/jadedness for the film typical of the film student set, Hunter elevated the scene to a quasi-psychedelic/minimalist 16 bit masterpiece. After showing it to one of his film professors, she remarked that this might be the most offensive thing she’s ever seen. Glorious praise if there ever was any. Take a peek:
Battleship Mario
And the original:
The Odessa Steps Sequence from The Battleship Potemkin
Remember this?
In other news, my new buddy Patsy K. Eagan tipped me onto a pretty damn interesting New Yorker article that some of you might have missed due to that issue’s eye-catching cover (I find it highlarious, btw). It’s a detailed ‘adventure’ into California’s growing culture, but what really struck was many of the interviewees’ reasons behind their current pursuit: the need to aid their anxiety. High recommended. Check it here.
Tags: Battleship Potemkin, Mario Paint, Pot and Anxiety, Sacrilege
