Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The Hitler YouTube meme
Are you familiar with the YouTube meme of taking the famous Hitler rant scene from Downfall and inserting novel subtitles? Here’s a good example:
I’ve lost track of how many of these I have watched. Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live; Hitler gets a girl pregnant; Hitler reacts to a ban on KFC nuggets. There must be hundreds of these. There’s even one in which Hitler rants against the proliferation of Hitler rant videos. Seems like anyone and everyone with video capture and editing software has made a Hitler rant video. Some of them are brilliant, some atrocious.
What’s happening, I think, is that we’re looking at the juxtaposition of (A) a stupendous performance and (B) that guy everyone loves to hate. Hitler himself has become so trite as a symbol of evil that it’s considered poor form to resort to a Hitler reference in an argument (see Godwin’s Law). You could try doing something like this with another great foreign language monologue, but if your subject ain’t Hitler, I doubt your video will find much traction.
The film itself, Downfall, is quite good, although depressing. Like most American Jews of a certain age, I was raised on Hitler this and Hitler that. I lost track of how many WWII movies my father dragged me off to. So for me to like a movie about Hitler, well, it says something about quality. Well worth a Net Flix rental.
D.
Some of these are brilliant! I wonder if there’s going to be a spin-off from Godwin’s Law involving Osama Bin Laden?