HomeStarRunnerTron, a cool kid on YouTube, once put together a little parody of the Pokemon TV Series in the format of YuGiOh Abridged. The idea is to take a TV show and chop it down to size, replacing the dialog with something silly while somehow keeping the original story flowing in your altered universe.
This kid inspires me. As silly as it sounds, both as a guy who makes video and a guy trying to crack into Voice Acting, this kid is cool. I found his video one day on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised… pretty much all of the main voices were done by he himself, matching the voice actors from the show close enough (except for Gary, who’s voice is just perfect to match the created character).
So, I present, Pokemon: Abridged (a few more thoughts after the videos)
I got in touch with him to tell him how impressed I and my friends were with his performance, and we got to chatting a little bit. He’s a cool kid. Why aren’t the videos on YouTube? Because apparently the parody detector of YouTube’s automated filters crapped out, or somebody at Nintendo/4Kids lacks a sense of humor and submitted as DCMA request (in this case file this under “flagrant misuse”). Luckily the videos aren’t completely gone! Well, it pretty much is, actually. I’ve found part one on a site with a broken embedded player (maybe you can get it to work), and part two on youtube filmed through hypercam D: Isn’t this the kind of thing Copyright is supposed to encourage people to make?
My friends and I were so impressed we made him the Third Real Life Guest Star of our webcomic, Missing Number (he’s the kid with the Pikachu in the top right hand corner):
The poster above his head “Do you like to say Duhhh?! I do.” Comes from a misunderstanding of the line right after Bulbasaur showed up in the first video segment above (the little green guy).
On a side note, we will never name a project after a computer glitch ever again. 1 out of every 5 issues had some kind of debilitating error that caused us to slip deadlines. Am I superstitious? I am now.
We’re discussing the possibility of reviving the comic. Hmm. That’d be fun…
