Tag Archives | mashups

Time travel/pop culture mashups with humor potential

By Mark A. Rayner on November 28, 2011 in Hinky History, Parody & Satire

Gilligan looks surprised

Gilligan is marooned on “Más a Tierra”, later renamed to Robinson Crusoe Island, with Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who had a low tolerance for bullshit
Joey (from Friends) is sent back in time to live with Fourth Earl of Sandwich, while the Earl was still working on his eponymous invention. (I recommend sending Joey back to the time when Sandwich was still using cedar boards instead of bread.)*
Transport all the characters of MASH (season 7 or after) back to the actual Korean War. This could be first offering in a series of pop culture/war mashups, which could include:
- McHale’s Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar
- China Beach at the Crimea
- Hogan’s Hero’s at the Battle of Gaugamela (put them on Persian side for maximum laughs)
Jerry Seinfeld is sent to work at a medieval tannery in Sweinslop, Germany, without any sneaker polish
Cliff Claven and Norm Peterson join the Donner Party.
The main cast of Sex in the City visits Krakatoa, in 1883, moments before it explodes with the 13,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

This is just the beginning. Now all we need to do is invent a working time machine, and have some kind of way of turning fictional characters into real people.

*You may want to check out Woody Allen’s excellent article about the invention of the sandwich, Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This? Alltop would love to join the Donner Party. It loves parties!

Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures, Mark II

By Mark A. Rayner on September 12, 2010 in But is it art?, Parody & Satire

Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures It’s back!

This contest ran a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, so let’s do it again.

Here’s the concept: find a vintage ad, and then create a product from a created world — it can be from a book, movie, TV, etc. It doesn’t have to be science fiction; you could go with a fantasy world, an alternate reality, whatever. The only proviso is that it has to have been written by someone else, so none of your own bizarre fictional futures. Here’s a couple I mocked up, based on the grim post-apocalyptic THE ROAD and the less-grim, but still post-apocalyptic THE POSTMAN (both books worth reading, btw):

It doesn’t have to be post-apocalyptic, by the way. If you’re more of an optimistic Star Trek kind of person, then I’m happy to see Oil of Olay ads featuring Warf, scotch ads with Scotty, or ear-hair trimming systems endorsed by Quark.

Here are the finalists from last time to help you get the idea.

Or you can in a gallery here“>check out the gallery for this year’s contest is here.

How to enter:

create your masterpiece (a jpg, png, pfd or gif, please)
post it to your blog, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous … or just email it to me
let me know about it (including the work it’s based on), in the comments, by email (markarayner-at-gmail-dot-com) or Twitter (@markarayner) — let me know who to credit, and include your website if you watn
they will go in a gallery here, and I’ll update the blog periodically too
do it by midnight, Monday October 4th
wait for the aplomb and/or ridicule of your peers
I’ll narrow it down to a shortlist of five, and then everyone can vote on those.

The Prizes:

The winner chooses from:

a walk-on appearance in the novel I’m currently working on (this will be the last chance for a year at least)
a tshirt from either of my shops, CafePress or Wordans

The runner up: