YouTube, I tube, wel all tube for...something or other...

Well, the penny's finally dropped at Moore towers. Several of my internet friends have been doing nothing but watching YouTube videos for months. I've looked at links people have sent me and chuckled, but I've never really seen what all the fuss is about. Now however you can count me amongst the converted. Search for any show or film you can think of, just about, and hey presto, 3 minute clips of the best bits neatly arrnged for you. I spent a good hour doing a kind of Scrubs "Greatest Hits" and bloody good fun it was too. Quite often you'll find whole episodes split up into 3 or more files. While this is good, and reminds me a bit of the late, lamented CraftyTV.com, it suffers the same drawbacks as crafty did. The quality is invariably a bit shoddy. There's no fullscreen option, and vitally no "always on top" windowed mode. Any video longer than 3 minutes is useless if you can't hover it somewhere on the page and get on with something else at the same time. I've been tempted to embed a few choice clips in this journal today, but I can't change the width they appear at, and it fucks up my template, so that will have to wait until I con one of my clever friends into making this page look pretty.

This whole business brings me on to a topic I've been trying to avoid for a while, that of Fan Films. I watch quite alot of these, just because I feel I should, and your first instinct would be right, 99% of them are fucking terrible. Usually people who have the time and inclination to put the necessary amount of effort into producing these things are the saddest, saddest people on the top of a very big pile of very sad people. And, of course, 90% of the medium is made up of Star Trek and Dr. Who tributes.

Let's just take a whole new paragraph to make it clear that Dr. Who is shit. It's always been shit, and always will be shit. It's shit because the premise is that because the writing and acting are so great it doesn't matter that the production values and special effects are terrible. And, of course, that it's scary. WRONG. It's embarrassing. Everything about it screams "CHEAP!" and it makes me ashamed to be British.

Anyway, there are some rare exceptions to the fan film rule. As Paul Calf once said, inside every bag of shite there's a Crunchy wrapper. There's some links here of stuff that's actually not bad. Some of them actually made me laugh quite alot, and one or two, while not actually good, are impressive just for the time and energy put in to produce half decent production values on a zero budget. Where possible I've linked to a version on YouTube, but some of them are too long for that so they're hosted on iFilm, which carries adverts. Sorry about that, but hey.

Losing Lois Lane is what started my quest to find half decent fan pics in the first place. It's well acted, and very, very funny in places. Helps to have a bit of DC character knowledge, but not essential. This is the one I really think you should bother watching. I's about 20 minutes though, so if you can't hack it at least try this 3 minute YouTube clip.

Faast Times at Hero High is pretty funny. Again, it's a bit heavy on the in-jokes, but worth 3:30 of anyone's time. Daredevil's cameo appearance creased me up.

This Superman/Batman trailer is not fantastic, but it does make me really wish someone would make this film, so it's a success as a trailer.

Finally for today, Batman: Dead End is probably the pick of the lot. Bat's looks a bit tubby and gay, but then he's supposed to really, and I kind of prefer this to all the black body armour they put him in for feature films. The makers of this have done a great job on a budget of nothing at all.

Hope you enjoy some of these, and yes, I know how sad I am.