Here "sampling" is being used in the sense of American hip-hop artists taking bass lines or drum beats from established songs and using them as the backbones of their own songs. MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice both got sued very badly for not acknowledging the sources for their mainstream busting hits "You Can't Touch This" and "Ice, Ice Baby", respectively (originally, also respectively, Rick James and Queen).
I believe that this kind of sampling can occur in other forms. Personally I've been working on a novel (down the pipeline) that touches on this subject (I've spoken about it with Norm and maybe Corrie). My prospective novel dealing with this is a little more in depth than another item that has to be in this same area, the mostly well known "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". I'm sure you can guess the idea...
Now this post is about something entirely different from re-writing a classic piece of literature from the prospective of a zombie invasion (way far away from my own idea), but could be seen as a "sampling" I posit.
Okay.
My brother Dan turned me on to an episode of a web show on Cracked.com's site. The show, After Hours, featured four friends sitting around a table dissecting, hilariously and highly intellectually, pop culture items, and the specific episode Dan sent me was "Why 'Back to the Future' is Secretly Horrifying". That turned out ot be the first episode from these folks, and has since been seen by nearly five million people.
It you haven't yet seen it, please watch. All the episodes are enlightening and entertaining. The website has other shows that they create, on a shoestring budget really. For a while, one of the character/actors from After Hours, Michael Swaim, played a robot who sifted the internet for random websites and brought them to viewers like Tosh. It was funny.
The producers began to get ambitious. They made a show about a Jedi school in the Star Wars universe. I didn't watch it too much, but it looked good.
Another recent show they created is called "Rom.com", a show at a dating website office. It's quite funny and very smart.
And then we get to the show that caused me to post in the first place.
"Welcome Back Potter" is the name of this newest show. Michael Swaim plays a mostly adult Harry Potter who, with Ron(?), left Hogwarts and took off for Muggle-Land in America as a kid, and they, he and Ron, have been using magic and scamming Yanks since they arrived. The chick, Hermione maybe (sorry, I don't know anything about Harry Potter besides the drive-in movie I watched in SLO with Gary Oldman and mucho vino) has come to America to try to convince them to return and stop the nose-less dude, Voldemort.
That's the premise that's discussed in the opening thirty seconds of their webisodes. Where am I going with this? Right here:
Who does Swaim look like here?
I saw some of the previews and thought, oh my, Swaim's playing Harry as Hunter. Harry and Ron changed their names, Harry to "Jarry" and Ron to "Don", and "Don" has based his mannerisms on those of somebody from Jersey Shore.
Swaim is playing an adult Harry Potter exactly like Raoul Duke, and it's pretty exciting. This is one of the moments that made me think of artistic sampling. Here's one writer/actor's interpretation of a scamming adult Harry Potter on the lam---Raoul Duke.
This led me to look for some pictures...
Ron/Don isn't playing Oscar Zeta Acosta, which is kinda a bummer, and probably too much to ask for, since The Situation opposite Duke is funny enough. Here's Oscar (and Hunter):
I won't waste the reader's time with who's who.
Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke and Oscar Acosta/The Avenging Lawyer have been represented before in film, first in 1980:
and again in 1998:
Which makes this picture marginally more meaningful:
From 1994: Bill Murray and Johnny Depp both appeared in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. In other times they both befriended and then portrayed one of Hunter's alter egos, Raoul Duke.
Now...if only I could find a Peter Boyle/Benicio del Toro movie...
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