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Meet Todd Graham: In the 80s, Graham and a bunch of friends set about taking old VHS tracks of their favorite childhood cartoons, and overlaying the audio with dialogue from much darker films. This is the genesis of Apocalypse Pooh, which Movie City News recently called both the first and "the most influential" mashup of all time. That's a pretty heavy honor, considering we still don't know who created Dark Side Of The Rainbow (the 'Wizard of Oz' mashup of Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side Of The Moon') or what specifically qualifies as a video mashup. Below, we look at Apocalypse Pooh and the difference between the genre-defining "video remix" and the mashup vid.


Apocalypse Pooh represents a true mashup. And the cited article goes on to loosely categorize almost any re-edited video as a mashup. But they're not: After all, in music when you take a song (say Rihanna's 'Umbrella') and add beats to play in the club, it's not a mashup, it's a remix. So while Movie City defines Robert Ryang's 2005 'Shining' as a mashup video, it's actually a video remix:



Other examples of video remixes (which basically take a film and turn it into another genre with some light editing and different music) include the stalker version of 'When Harry Met Sally':


Or 'Something Blue':


And 'Brokeback To The Future':


Meanwhile, actual video mashups are rarer. A mashup involves at least two different sources (neither of them original) and overlaying them to create a distinct third entity. Like this CollegeHumor video of comedians in animated movies:

It's actually way harder to find a real video mashup then it is to find a video remix. Those G.I.Joe PSAs hit pretty close, but aren't technically mashups, since they add original dialogue over the source material. (NSFW language):


The Star Trek TNG viral series is sort of a combo remix of what Movie City describes as two different sub-genres: "reanimation" (which "breathes new life into works with the simple addition of contrasting music, title cards and original dialogue that appears in a whole new context") and the "fusion" video (which "mashes two wildly opposing properties into one coherent and funny whole. The fusion uses imagery and audio from both sources to create a new entity"):



So to recap! Much like in the world of music, viral videos can fall under the "remix" or "mashup" category. Don't even get us started on cinema "covers":



Thanks for the tip, J!