May All Your Christmases Be Incepted...

If, like me,  you've spent any amount of time checking out the various mashup videos on YouTube, then you may have noticed that almost all mashups move in trends. Somebody posts a trailer recut into another genre (ie: the romantic comedy version of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shinning) and soon genre splicing trailers can be seen as far as the mouse can click.

Trailers are, in fact,the most popular mashup genre. In many mashup trailers, the sound from a trailer from one movie is played to the visuals of another entirely different movie.  So you might see a mashup of the soundtrack from the trailer of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal set to the visuals of, say, Sister Act 2 or vice versa (that's not a real mashup, BTW-but don't ya just with that is was?).

The mashup trends are often long lasting and far reaching. Movies directed by Christopher Nolan are very popular mashup fodder. His 2008 Batman epic, The Dark Knight, has inspired mashups with everything from Toy Story 2 to the 1966 Adam West Batman movie (yeah sometimes they kinda make sense) to The Wizard of Oz to The Simpsons and anything that may come up in between.

In the last year and a half, Christopher Nolan's other big hit movie, Inception, has become a very popular mashup subgenre. Nolan's 2010 Sci-fi thriller about Leonardo Dicaprio and his Dream Team (get it?) of mind criminals has crossed over into Blade Runner, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter territory, to name just a few.

Well, it being December and all, I have noticed an all new new Inception mashup sub-subgenre: Christmas movies.

YouTube now features a surprising number of Inception mashups featuring classic yuletide movies:







Yep. There is something about that Hans Zimmer Inception score that can make just about any scene from any movie thrilling and mysterious. Who knew that shots of an eight year old kid in a Roy Rogers cowboy outfit carrying a BB gun could be so darkly dramatic?

Sometime these mashups will incorporate some elements of the original movies from which the scenes are taken but still maintain the basic Inception premise:



Or, in other cases, the mashup will keep the dialogue and just let that great ol' Inception music do all the juxtaposing:





Or if you prefer a more classic traditional Christmas Inception mashup:





Then this mashup takes one of the best selling songs (Christmas or otherwise) ever and goes in a whole other Inception direction:





Yes, may all your Christmases be incepted!

Enjoy this holiday season everybody!