Katie King, a self-described "media-obsessed chick who digs all things sci-fi," impressed even jaded meme connoisseurs this week with her re-creation of the music video for the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" using scenes from Battlestar Galactica.
Drawing on video-editing skills from her day job as art director at an ABC television affiliate in Virginia, King cobbled together the witty and smooth shot-for-shot re-creation of Spike Jonze's masterful "Sabotage" video using snippets from Galactica.
"The first shot I imagined and the first I went looking for were of [Commander] Adama's iconic and short-lived mustache," recalled King in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The rest fell into place from there."
The above video compares the Galactica version with the real "Sabotage" video and puts things in perspective for those who haven't memorized every shot in the original Beasties clip: If you dart your eyes back and forth fast enough, you can see the stunning precision with which her re-creation mimics the original.
Speaking of mimicking the original, this isn't the first such "Sabotage" mashup – witness liventoride's "Beastie Boys - Sabotage - Halo 3 Side by Side" and wolfgangmozart187's Empire Strikes Back version. The former works pretty well, but it's staged within the game (as admirable as that is). What's incredible about "Sabotage: Galactica," King's third fan video, is the degree to which she was able to find scenes in the movie that duplicated or nearly duplicated the ones in Jonze's creation – a "Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon"-style epiphany.
"It was one of those times where you hear a song a hundred times and on the hundred and first, a light bulb turns on," King said. "I had hoped that it would be 100 percent shot-for-shot, but about halfway through, I had to start improvising. Each time I would take a clip, lay it down and set the timing, I would just start grinning like a maniac. I think I wore out the springs in my office chair jumping up and down a few times when a shot worked really well."
King, known on YouTube as katamaran78, said she completed the video in five days working only an hour or two each night. The majority of that time was spent ingesting the videos onto her computer and hunting for shots, said King, who credits the high quality of her mashup to Jonze's original vision.
"If it hadn't been for the amazing editing in the Spike Jonze original, this would have been nothing but a clip show," said King. "I simply paid homage to him, the Beastie Boys and most importantly to me, Battlestar Galactica."
As with most awesome derivative works, there's a chance the copyright cops could force YouTube to pull this video.
"Holy crap, I didn't expect this to take off like it did. Hi everyone!" reads a note on King's video. "Song property of Capitol Records and Beastie Boys. Video property of NBC/Universal. No infringement intended, just a fan tribute to both."
Considering the generally agreed-upon excellence of this video, Capitol and NBC/Universal would be wise to accept it as tribute and allow it to continue racking up hits on YouTube, where it is currently approaching 20,000 combined views. (In other words, you're still early.)
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