COOL STUFF

The 2012 Movie Trailer Mash-Up Kicks Off Our Yearly Retrospective

by Ethan Anderton
December 3, 2012

It's getting towards the end of 2012, and if all goes well, the world will still be here in 2013. But the end of another year means it's time for the traditional retrospectives of the year in film. Today we have our first video looking back at all of the films from this year with The 2012 Movie Trailer Mash-Up. It's not quite as eloquent as some of the edits we've seen in the past (and will likely see in the near future), but there's some great moments here and it's always fun to see movies like The Dark Knight Rises thrown together with Silver Linings Playbook. There's animated movies, documentaries, blockbusters, indies and everything.

Here's The 2012 Movie Trailer Mash-Up sent to use straight from SleepySkunk:

And here's a breakdown of the inspiration that went into each segment:

PRIMA PARTE - The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: Pruitt-Igoe was a large urban housing project that became infamous for symbolizing the shattered dreams of many and was subject to a great documentary this year. By the late 1960's, it had gone from a promise of a better future for thousands of families to a place of desolation, poverty and crime. Not unlike the fate of its inhabitants, many characters in this year's motion pictures have had to endure a vision of the future that demanded their hopes to make room for despair. From the Orwellian districts of The Hunger Games to the corporate conspiracies of Branded and the highly-controlled buildings of The Raid and Dredd 3D, dystopia certainly made its comeback this year.

SECONDA PARTE - Tick Tick Boom: A song that has been attempted in online movie mashups countless times. I always wanted to take a crack at it and celebrate every note of explosive silliness that transpire through this epic hit from The Hives. The inspiration I got from Tick Tick Boom wasn't that it clearly promotes balls-out action all over the walls but that it does it with a sense of self-awareness and light parody. This is precisely the tone that we've found in offerings such as Battleship, The Expendables 2, and (last but not least) Joss Whedon's The Avengers. These movies all know they're silly but rather than convincing us of the contrary, they decide to embrace it and focus on giving us what we crave: great walls of fire erupting everywhere and heroes who can't bother to look at them.

PARTE FINALE - Everything is Connected: My third segment was an attempt to explore what can only described in Hollywood as the merger of mainstream blockbusters and small independent films. Now more than ever, young and emerging filmmakers have the affordable technology in their post-production to make their shoestring-budgeted features feel as visually striking as a major studio production. On the other side of the coin, the big studios are increasing financing on their Oscar hopefuls and make sure to spare no expense in order to make a resourceful production look as indie as possible. I tried to blend the little movies, the big ones, and put my emphasis on those who happen to be one but pretending to be the other.

Even if certain parts of the video didn't work for me, I like how much thought SleepySkunk put into this project, not to mention all the hours he must have spent editing. For a full list of the movies in the video, check out his Tumblr right here, and a list of the songs from the video can be found on the actual YouTube page. Stay tuned for more of the best retrospective videos and other year-end coverage. Pretty cool video?

Filed under Cool Stuff, To Watch

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