The idea of recut trailers and trailer mash-ups was arguably conceived in 2001 by Kathryn Hempel of Cutters. Having recently joined the board for the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE), Kathryn wanted to give Cutters’ assistant editors a new creative outlet, and the Trailer Park competition was born. But it wasn’t until 2003 – when Spencer Sommers’ Passion of the Christ parody was threatened with a lawsuit and Robert Ryang’s 2005 AICE Trailer Park winner “Shining” found a home on video-sharing sites – that the genre entered the mainstream. Created by a few Australian students in Fall 2006 under the auspices of Globecast Network, Trailer Mash sifts through the web and aggregates only the best of the genre to display.
The trailers featured on this site have gone through some major surgeries. Some consist of transplants from other movies, while others move around pieces to create a new kind of story. Still, others have had the ultimate trailer surgery: genre re-assignment. You can browse the trailers by revised genre (including Action, Comedy, Drama, Horror/Thriller, Mash-Up, Parody, Romance, and even Gay Romance), user rating, or movie title. While most of the trailers use clips from the movies themselves, a few create additional footage (like in C for Cookie where Sesame Street characters reenact a world where the consumption of cookies is government-controlled as a spoof of V for Vendetta). Some filmmakers, like Mike and Ari of Smacky Productions, use authentic-sounding movie announcer voiceovers to guide their revised story for spoofs like 10 Things I Hate About Commandments and Must Love Jaws. The site contains a high percentage of well-done creations, so you’ll be able to easily find a few belly laughs with minimal effort.
Personally, my favorite is Crew Cuts’ hilarious “Enter the Dragon, Bitch!” It’s not the best use of editing by any stretch of the imagination, but it does take an overlooked minor character in a legendary Bruce Lee film and turns the character, an unfortunate sidenote in Blaxploitation encyclopedias, into a fully realized protagonist with his very own theme song.
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