8/18/10

Something that makes me LOL

Just to mix it up a bit, and stray from my usual empowering deep/philosophical/motivational/advisory blog posts, I thought I'd briefly discuss (and recommend) something that makes me laugh...

I watched cartoons like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z when I was younger. (In fact, not many people know, the name "OBECorp" is actually somewhat inspired by "Kaiba Corp." in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series). These cartoons (ie: anime) were fairly interesting when they were imported from Japan and brought on TV a few years ago, but the Internet YouTube community happened to make it even more so interesting.

Enter the "Abridged Series" craze. As many may know, the overall story in many anime cartoons take way too long to tell, and the story structure has it's share of "filler" (ie: acts that doesn't advance the overall plot)ots and non-sensical pl. Therefore, a guy name Martin Bellany (aka "littlekuriboh"), decided to start the abridged craze by making his own abbreviated parody of the 1st episode of Yu-Gi-Oh!, filled with his own voiceovers, silly allusions to the original series, mixed in with pop-culture references. That got popular very fast, so he decided to make more.

A few hundred thousand views and couple of YouTube bans later, we have a craze, that's still going strong. Since then, his abridged series have inspired hundreds more in YouTube (most of which, sadly isn't nearly as good). Not to mention, his YouTube channel won Mashable's Funniest YouTube channel in 2009. 

What's even more impressive is that this dude's panel drew 1700 people in the 2010 Otakon convention... on a Sunday morning. 1700 people? For a parody panel? That is crazy! Many "celebrities" can't draw that many (in a Sunday morning, no less).

"Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series" (YGOTAS for short) started the craze, but "Dragon Ball Z Abridged" by Team Four Star (TFS), took it to another level. Dragon Ball Z was great because of it's story and action packed battle scenes, but it was also notorious for filler, slow storytelling, and bad English dubbing. Team Four Star is composed of a bunch of DBZ fans, with gifted voice talents, and told the story within the Dragon Ball Universe in an extremely hilarious and creative way.

Enough of me blogging about them though... if you're familiar with these 2 cartoons, feel free to check out the "abridged" versions yourself. Here are the YGOTAS and TFS YouTube channels. (You may still get the jokes even if you're not familiar with the cartoons). Whenever I have a bad day or I'm down on myself and need to laugh, I watch some of this stuff.

But simply put, these guys are comic geniuses and have become their own celebrity. They've also become brands upon themselves (if these guys weren't restricted by IP rules, they will probably never have to work). Like I said, if you can draw 1700 people in the middle of Baltimore on a Sunday morning, you're doing something right.


So if you need a laugh, I do recommend finding an "Abridged Series" in YouTube... mainly the YGOTAS and TFS abridged series I discussed. You can find more abridged series in YouTube, and although most are bad, some of them are pretty good. But the aforementioned are the two that I closely follow. So check em out when you can.


D4P...PD!!!
-OBE


(I guess that I take back that this isn't an "empowerment" blog, considering laughing is a form of empowerment and wellness.)

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