In this weeks blog I want to discuss the parodies that most of us are familiar with and watch for laughs on YouTube and other video-sharing/social websites. One of the most successful and very well known spoofs is the "Hitler Reacts to ......" parodies that have been going on for almost three years now! The scene is based in a room that has Hitler and a lot of very high ranked army generals facing him. He then orders most of them to leave the room except for a few, and then goes on an anger rampage yelling at them in disgust and disbelief. From a filming point of view, the acting in this scene was amazing and it makes you really live in the moment, which made it a very fertile soil for a parody, especially since it has the very well known Hitler in it, who was known for his no nonsense attitude and his awful history. The original movie that this scene was extracted from a movie called the Downfall (or Der Untergang in German) released in 2004 this German/Italian/Austrian epic war film is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, it depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin bunker and Nazi Germany in 1945, so you can only imagine how serious and climatic this scene was originally planned to be!
This entry of Ranker describes it best, the author of this entry says:
"Usually the video clip starts with someone informing him of something horrible, Hitler brushes it off as a solvable problem. Full of fear, his commanders tell him that his solution is not possible. He tells everyone who isn't important to leave and then goes on a huge tirade about something. Of course, this meme has always been in German, so people replace the subtitles in the original German film to make Hitler rant about pretty much anything. Examples include everything from Disney buying Marvel, to random movie reviews, to the lack of new features in a new tech product."
Click on the link to read the rest of the entry and watch the top 10 Hitler Downfall Parodies Of All Time.
After a lot of research to know how this specific "Hitler Reacts" parodies started I got to a close approximation after some discussions with people in famous forums and blogs. It is said to have started with the Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, and rightly so, the oldest one on the internet is this one, uploaded on the 7th of June 2007 with an astonishing 6,191,322 views so far! Thousands of other similar parodies have been created following this one.
Additionally, the director of the movie was once interviewed and asked about what he thinks of all these parodies that they made from his movie, his response was really positive.
One of the funniest "Hitler Reacts" parodies I watched was the one made by one of our very own AUS students, who in this parody makes fun and mocks the problems an AUS student would faces when registering his courses on banner, in this Hitler in AUS video. This shows you how popular and spread out this parodies are! People normally love this stuff because you can fit in as many racist/pop/inside jokes as possible, it was also a mean in which news could travel really quickly. Many people would not even know who Usain Bolt is for example, until they watched the parody and then read/reasearched/wikipediad him to know what the parody is all about, so in a sense these parodies can act as a very powerful media/news tool!
So does everyone have this kind of rant in them? Thanks for informing me. Wish I could play this in class!
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