Trending: Power Rangers vs the Cookie Monster

In which I address online news, web content and trending issues.

It feels like cheating: addressing a year-old video for this particular article series.  The thing is, though, that it only just now showed up on my news feed - showed up in virtual droves - to the point where I thought that it was a response to, or at least inspired by, the slightly more recent Power Rangers fan video.  I guess some things - like ultra-violent Power Rangers reimaginings - are simply timeless fonts of creativity.  Check it out here:

While Power/Rangers took the idea of a gritty, dystopian, Michael Bay-esque Power Rangers seriously, this takes the same basic idea to its comic extreme: pairing up a new generation of Rangers against a deranged, Grendelian Cookie Monster.  It eases us in with everything that we've come to expect from the franchise: flashy flips, kicks and punches, epically drawn out transformations and the rockin' 90's theme song.

Things take an unexpected turn, however, when the Cookie Monster's blood lust leads to the a-characteristically bloody dispatchment of the entire team.  The Red Ranger gets his leg shattered shortly before being decapitated.  The Pink Ranger is beaten to death with his own dismembered arm.  The Green Ranger makes a hasty retreat when it's obvious he's about to go down, only to be ripped out from the sky and have his spine broken.

The coup de grace, of course, is that the girl that the Rangers were trying to save in the first place has made no move to escape during this entire escapade.  She sat there nervously eating her cookie, making her easy prey to the now unoccupied Monster.  When she offers him what's left of the cookie in a desperate bid to save her life, he rips out the rest of the cookie from her stomach: cutting out just before he gorges himself on the bloodied treat.

Being the random fan video that it is, it naturally succumbs to all of the failures that you'd expect of its genre.  It has perhaps some of the worst use of shaky cam that I've ever seen, with rapid zoom ins and zoom outs that make it difficult to see what's going on half the time.  What's more is that it's obvious that these techniques were employed to make it artificially more exciting and mask what little they had to work with (over-sized costumes, toys and some recycled transformation clips).

The thing is, though, that it didn't need to cover its inequities up with distracting camera movements.  It's a video about guys in Power Rangers costumes being brutally murdered by a guy in a Cookie Monster costume over a Subway cookie.  The internet takes these things at face value.  In fact, its obviously non-existent budget is what makes the concept buyable in the first place.

Give the same people a million dollars to do the exact same thing and it becomes unbearably stupid to watch.  Why?  Because the idea is basically just bad fan fiction taken to a hilariously absurd degree.  That's fine for a YouTube video, but nobody wants to watch another Twilight.  Reshoot the same video, with the same bargain bin props and costumes, only without the camera and you end up with a far superior end product.

That being said, however, this is probably one of the funniest internet videos that I've seen in a long time.  The actors' acrobatics is actually really impressive, the premise hilariously absurd and the violence successfully toes the line between gruesome and laughable.  I'd actually love to see the same group of people work on other videos in the future.

So what's your favorite Gen X parody video?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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