Clip of the Day: Incredible Disney - Sin City Mash-Up

In terms of YouTube culture, I’ve never been a big fan of the viral videos that get passed around that create Internet celebrities for 15 seconds and then disappear, leaving behind only a bunch of outdated jokes (It’s taken me this long to find out what the Hell a Honey Badger was), or the videos of cats. But one type of video that I do like because it actually takes a degree of skill and talent to produce are mash-ups. The videos that take audio from one source and visuals from another and puts them together to recontextualize something.

Today’s Clip of the Day is one of the best mash-ups I’ve seen in a while, “Walt Disney’s SIN CITY”. First of all, I love how pretty much each shot and cut of the mash-up matches up with the corresponding shot and cut of the trailer. Speaking as an editor, any idiot can cut and paste two shots together, but it takes someone with incredible skill to know what shot to use and when exactly to cut and how to create a tempo that never loses the audiences patience. Secondly, I like that it uses three of my favorite Disney films (Beauty and the Beast, The Great Mouse Detective and The Hunchback of Notre Dame) as the primary sources for the three individual stories that make up Sin City. While I’m not a fan of recasting the sympathetic Quasimodo in the creepy Benicio del Toro role and Nick Stahl is no Vincent Price, I absolutely love the idea of Mickey Rourke as The Beast. Hopefully Guillermo del Toro can see this and take note for if and when he does his version of Beauty and the Beast. And finally, for a company that’s made its reputation as purveyor’s of squeaky clean family entertainment, this video shows off their more lascivious side (I had completely forgotten about the stripper mice in Mouse Detective which has probably inspired a few too many bits of artwork on deviantart.com), as well as their underrated talent of making awesome action sequences. The car chase in 101 Dalmatians, the Big Ben sequence in Great Mouse Detective, the rooftop battle between The Beast and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast and the finale of Hunchback of Notre Dame are just a few examples of the baller action scenes that Disney can put together. All these are on display in this expertly edited mash-up.