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‘Dark Knight’ inspires parody featuring The Joker’s henchmen complaining about Batman
Improv is a long-standing love of mine. I was a religious
watcher of Drew Carey’s “Whose Line is it Anyway?” and even tried my hand at
performing improvised comedy while in high school and college. At Ohio
University I was part of a group called Black Sheep. I had a lot of fun
improvising scenes and games and performing during my time with Black Sheep,
mostly because I shared the stage with a lot of people who were a lot funnier
and more talented than me.
People like the guys who put together this video, which came
to my attention when a friend I was in Black Sheep with posted a link on
Facebook.
My friend me in touch with the men who put together
the video. The three actors in the sketch are Luke Null, Travis Khoury and
Patrick White (@PatrickBeige).
The video was produced by Joe Lalonde (@joe_lalonde)
and directed, filmed and edited by Alex Winfrey (@AlexMWinfrey)
as part of Baby Mountain, a now-defunct sketch comedy group, in association
with AVW Productions,
a student-run media production house at OU. You can check out other videos from
Baby Mountain on its YouTube channel
or its Funny or Die page.
Baby Mountain was Winfrey’s brainchild, and the name was
retired when he graduated this spring. Null also graduated from OU and the
spring, but White, Khoury and Lalonde are still students at OU.
The video actually grew out of a running joke about how
terrible Batman could be. As White put it, the jokes grew out of the premise that
Batman was “literally the worst person in the world.”
When the group got around to actually filming it, it was
the beginning of OU’s spring quarter. The actors, all members of OU Improv (a group
that grew out of Black Sheep), did their own clown makeup and got together in
the living room of roommates Lalonde and Winfrey for the shoot.
Once the camera was rolling, Lalonde said “Patrick, Luke
and Travis just kept riffing off each other.”
All of the lines were improvised on the spot, though some
were derived from earlier jokes or reshot after part of the trio burst into
laughter.
“We did a ton of lines,” White said.
Winfrey said they shot about an hour and a half of video,
which he didn’t get around to editing recently. He said he knew the “closer we
released it to the release date of that (“The Dark Knight Rises”), the more
attention it would get.”
Once Winfrey finished cutting the video down he uploaded
the video on YouTube and posted it to Funny or Die.
He also emailed Slash Film,
a movie blog, and Slash Film featured the video in a July 9 post.
The video was trending on Funny or Die after Slash Film embedded the link.
As of this morning, the video had a 95-percent funny
rating on Funny or Die with about 900 views.
Bonus
Bloopers and deleted scene includes some of the jokes
that didn’t make the five-minute cut of “The Henchmen.”
Sidenote
“The Dark Knight Rises” opens July 20. I’m super jealous
of my co-workers Entertainment Editor Mark Meszoros (@NHFeatures), and Sports
Editor Mark Podolski (@MPodo), who are getting an advance screening on July
17.
They’ll be doing a podcast with Chris Lambert, who writes
for the News-Herald
Community Media Lab
blog Comics: Don’t Get Me Started,
sometime in the next week, which will be posted on www.News-Herald.com and right here on
Tuned in to Pop Culture.
Their previous podcasts on this summer’s comic book
movies were entertaining and definitely worth a listen if you’re as into comics
and the films they spawn as I am.
Labels: Batman, Batman Begins, comic books, parody, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises
posted by Nicole Franz at
4:02 PM
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