Roffdubbing and Memetic Mutation

David Stiefel TVPR 110 Roffdubs Report

The article in class, clearly the brainwork of Barnes Brooks at The New York Times, would have us believe that the recent phenomenon we are experiencing with Disney taking a lax attitude towards the roffdubbing of its cartoon critters into a rap video is something that has happened entirely out of the blue. Roffdubbing, a shorthand for “rip-off dubbing,” is nothing new. However, the term is not as popular as “dub-adapt” or “parody.”

One should be careful with these terms. A lot of what is called “parody” on the web is really roffdub. “Parody” creates something new which mocks something old, usually by copying the style. “Roffdub” is when something is taken out of the old scenario and is put to new audio. “Dub-adapt” or “adaptation” is done when the original is edited and remixed with new audio with the express permission of the creator of the original. Roffdub requires no legal constraints to exist, dub-adapt implies legal permissions were granted.

To get to the root of all this, it helps if we wind back our clocks...all the way to 1949! In that year, the Japanese were still in anguish from the defeat of World War II. It became obvious that what Japan needed most to lift its spirits was an identity in the field of world entertainment. They would soon get their wish. The Toei Company, working on a shoestring budget, would be formed. They would specialize in using filming techniques that were not quite yet accepted standard in Hollywood, and would develop them further, specializing primarily in the field of pyrotechnics.

Toei, being very entrepreneurial after the influence of American capitalism, soon had subsidiaries. Three years after its founding, one of Toei’s subsidiaries, Toho Ltd., would begin working on a special new genre of film: kaiju. Realizing the potential for children’s programming, Kaiju was eventually developed further with superheroes at the core to develop the early beginnings of the special effects, or tokusatsu genre. But before either genre took off, they needed a flagship. The producers at Toho had just the thing: Gojira.

The gigantic, radioactive dinosaur quickly became such an icon, that the “powerful lizard” instantly caught the attention of western audiences. By 1954, Gojira was officially unleashed worldwide, and created a scramble of popularity in the west. (IMDB) In some ways, the genre was retroactively applied to King Kong, who wouldn’t face off against Gojira until much later.

The popularity of the beast gave desperate Hollywood execs a much-needed source of inspiration, and a challenge: how do you successfully import something like this? Subtitles were one thing, but dubbing began to take on a new life and new popularity. Gojira, of course, became the test puppet. He was not-surprisingly given the name Godzilla for his US release.

The success of Godzilla, however painted Toei into a corner. They knew they needed to capture the imagination of the US market even more. However, for many years, they’d have little success. Instead, they would succeed at importing ideas from American shows. Toei no Supaidâ-Man (literally “Toei Presents: The Spider-Man”) would become one of the most infamous shows in Japanese TV in 1978 ever to be based on an American icon. (IMDB 2)

Around that time in the 1970’s, Disney would start to factor into the picture more prominently. A group of hippies, led by Dan O’Neill, would found a group of parodists known as the “Air Pirates,” who would focus their 1971-initiated strip, “Air Pirates Funnies,” around defaming Disney characters mostly by depicting them as sadomasochistic, chain-smoking drug peddlers. (Wikipedia) This quickly resulted in a lawsuit by the reputation-tarnished Disney studio, with the offenders facing serious charges and fees in excess of $200,000. Yet, they also began an underground resistance movement. When Disney realized it couldn’t win the war, it dropped a lot of the charges in 1979. (Wikipedia) However, Disney lawyers would soon be on the defensive for years to come, threatening legal action against anyone who dared to defame its characters.

Also in the 1970’s, a movie would be released in Hong Kong titled Tiger and Crane Fist, retitled Savage Killers in some countries. This movie would gain significant popularity, but became even more well-known when it was dub-adapted in 2002 for the movie Kung-Pow!: Enter the Fist. This would mark the beginning of widespread popularity for dubbing spoofs. Yet, before that, dub-adapts were going on behind the scenes elsewhere. The 80’s saw repeated failure at getting Japanese and Chinese shows successfully into the US market, with noble exceptions like Speed Racer, Superbook, and The Flying House.

US markets, however, quickly seized on these shows with superior competition, including native programs such as GI Joe (which challenged the target audience for Speed Racer and more with heroes American children could relate to more closely), Hanna-Barbera’s The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, which quickly swept up and took over the video sales on the Christian market that previously belonged to Superbook, and more. With the exception of a few notable Bible anime video releases, the anime genre would never again dominate Christian markets, largely due to the success in 1995 of VeggieTales.

In the 1990’s, when the need for dub-adaptations was higher than ever, Toei got a break. It’s Super Sentai series was finishing up its run of Zyuranger, and a Jewish entertainment mogul named Haim Saban offered to dub-adapt footage from Zyuranger for American audiences, provided that the studio cooperated with his wishes. In 1993, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers were released into the children’s market, with unprecedented success and an almost viral rise to fame. This would lead Saban to less successful exploits in creating “American Tokusatsu,” including adapting the Metal Heroes once as the VR Troopers and twice as the BeetleBorgs, and adapting Kamen Rider Black RX as the Masked Rider. (Wikipedia) Oddly enough, in 1991, Disney got ironic revenge against the Air Pirates by assigning that name to the villains in their TV series TaleSpin.

But before independent filmmaker individuals and studios would widely catch on to the idea of parody, dub-adapt, and roffdub, something else had to happen to usher in the realm of independent filmmaking. That break for independents came in 1996. In that year, the game Quake would be released for the PC. (Wikipedia) The fact that Quake allowed players to take video footage of their in-game exploits created an avenue for the early days of what would become known as “machinima,” or “machine animation.”  After that, the floodgates truly were opened.

Bungie Studios would release Halo, which was also machinima-capable, and the rise in its popularity would take off. This would be followed by a sudden surge in machinima from games that included Final Fantasy VII, World of Warcraft, and more. However, machnima was still a very self-contained format with few viewers and very few ways of getting online. Also, it was limited to video editors.

In 2000, Maxis changed that. With the release of the surprisingly popular game The Sims, machinima was then broken into two parts: Album and Video. Album machinima consisted of storytellers merely taking snapshots and editing them in sequences to tell what were essentially graphic novels. Since these were much easier to post to the Internet, their popularity skyrocketed. Game manufacturers, in light of this, stopped thinking like old-school Disney types and started embracing 3rd-party by-products of their products, provided they weren’t defamatory in nature, as it significantly reduced advertising costs.

In 2003, Rooster Teeth Productions would be founded for the first time. They would be the first to make Halo machinima truly popular and a phenomenon on the Internet in its own right when they would release a spoof on the game itself, a comedy named Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles. This series would spawn numerous imitators, including Fireteam Charlie and The Codex. By 2005, Rooster Teeth would also be popularizing The Sims 2 by creating a series with it named The Strangerhood. They would go on to use F.E.A.R. to create P.A.N.I.C.S., and would make several mini-series using other games.

By 2005, the ability of companies to control piracy was getting smaller. Tolerance of violent and lewd language in the content of forms of entertainment was growing higher, and independent filmmakers the world over would find themselves with a powerful new ally: YouTube. YouTube’s fame grew almost virally, and spawned numerous imitators in the forms of MySpace Video, Google Video, and more. Photobucket would add video hosting features for users as well. In spite Google buying out YouTube, the fame of YouTube would only grow.

However, that’s when things took a turn for the ugly. In that same year of 2005, while most independents, particularly machinima artists, were busy making music videos with The Sims 2, others began doing less innocent things. The “YouTube Poop” block of programming would initiate when several independent artists would start creating deliberately poorly-dubbed and poorly-re-edited bits and snippets of shows such as Zelda, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sonic X, to create horrible spoofs. Most of them would focus on bizarre ways of giving Mario cameos in Sonic’s shows.

At the same time, a group from Chicago called My-Way Entertainment, founded by voice actor Randy Hayes, would create a roffdub called “The Juggernaut, Bitch!!!” He would reuse footage from part 3 of the Phoenix Saga of the 1992 X-Men animated series and set it to gangster-like, obscenity-ridden dialogue. It is credited as the origin of the Juggernaut character’s now-infamous catchphrase: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!!!”

The same group would make two obscenity-laced sequels, and also a Power Rangers spoof that would take footage from the episode “Mighty Morphin’ Mutants.” (Wikipedia) The spoof would rename Commander Crayfish as “The F*in’ Crab from 35th and Broadway,” and the episode would frequently make fun of former Major League baseball player Jose Conseco.

Disney, succumbing to the wounds of bad publicity, would grow desperate for good attention even to the point of not suing independents for slanderous roffdubbing of its works. Since Disney purchased the Power Rangers from Saban in 2002, right as the Wild Force Season was giving way to the Ninja Storm season, this meant that Disney went lax on My-Way. However, Marvel threatened to sue. (Wikipedia) Instead, they reached an out-of-court settlement. Since Randy Hayes stole from Marvel, Marvel would steal ideas back from him. In later X-Men comic book releases, the Juggernaut’s new catchphrase would be nearly canonized. Also, in the 2006 movie X-Men: The Last Stand, the Juggernaut would use the phrase on Shadowcat after she traps him in the floor.

Come 2007, rapper Soulja Boy would release a single called “Crank Dat,” and roffdubs featuring his work would quickly rise to fame on the Internet as memes, joining all the fan-made trailers for The Dark Knight, all the fan-made promotions for Snakes on a Plane, and the countless other tidbits that would dominate much of YouTube. These would include The Angry German Kid, the “Douche Girl,” LonelyGirl15, Numa Numa, the Dramatic Prairie Dog, the Chuck Norris List, and more, all made into a song by Channel Frederator operator Dan Meth in “The Meth Minute 39: Internet People!”.

The viral spread of the “Crank Dat” spoofs would include several Chipmunk variations (none of which have been approved by Bagdasarian Productions), several other unlikely victims such as Barney, and, of course, several classic Disney cartoons. While the Lion King, Pooh, and more have been victims, probably the one that bothered Brooks Barnes most was the Bambi spoof posted to YouTube by user GrumpyGrim. (GrumpyGrim)

And so, without further adieu, we have the scenario we have. It could be a while, in light of what is legal and what isn’t, for studios independent and large alike, to control the way content is reused when original ideas are lacking. Disney has by no means been the only victim of malicious re-use by others, but has learned that fighting too hard will only come back to haunt you. In the end, balances must be reached between new and recycled footage and between the legal and marketing aspects of the entertainment business; a very difficult if not impossible compromise that must eventually be realized. Sources:

"Air Pirates." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Oct 2007, 23:01 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Oct 2007 .

Gojira. The Internet Movie Database. http://imdb.com/title/tt0047034/

GrumpyGrim. “Crank Dat Soulja Boy Bambi 2.” YouTube. July 24, 2007. http://youtube.com/watch?v=pdi48oUdZP0

"List of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers monsters (Season One)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 3 Oct 2007, 17:43 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Oct 2007 .

"Masked Rider (TV series)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 5 Oct 2007, 23:30 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Oct 2007 .

"The Juggernaut Bitch!!." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Oct 2007, 07:47 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Oct 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Juggernaut_Bitch%21%21&oldid=163520676.

Toei no Supaidâ-Man. The Internet Movie Database. http://imdb.com/title/tt0185116/

"Quake." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Oct 2007, 19:57 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Oct 2007 .