Monday, May 5, 2008

Ready to superimpose your lips on mine?

Man, I love the syncro-vox interviews on Late Night with Conan O'Brien!

Over the weekend, I caught the latest one - with firebrand and, I use the term loosely, media darling (one we love to hate), Jeremiah Wright - on hulu.com; it was originally aired on April 30, 2008 (but now find it on-demand, natch). And as far as I'm concerned, Conan and his crew need to do more of these sketches, these fake celebrity interviews, of which I've apparently only seen just a handful, because wikipedia mentions no less than 12 different ones out there, from Tom Cruise and Donald Trump to Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton.

Wait, hold up a sec..

For those of you not familiar with syncro-vox, it is filming method that superimposes real talking lips onto a static photograph or cartoon (positioning the lips so that it looks as if the person/animal/whatever is doing the talking). But nevermind the technicals; all we need to know is that its results are totally silly and totally hilarious, especially in the hands of madwitty comedians like Robert Smigel and Brian Stack, who handle the syncro-vox "impersonations" on Conan.

So, without further ado, check the Reverend Jeremiah Wright on Conan now (video).. as, um, interpreted by Mr. Smigel. Awesome.

I've tried looking up some other clips on hulu.com and youtube.com, but I could only find a couple featuring (our governor), Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first (video) is "Arnold" role playing every cast member from Friends (much to Conan's chagrin, but to the audience's delight), and the second (video) is Arnold meeting "Arnold", followed by Arnold syncro-vox'ing Conan live. Huh? Just watch, and you'll see what I mean; the tables will have turned!

In any case, I wish I could find more clips, so if you have any links/leads, let me know! In the meantime, good evening!.. and goddamn you (all to hell) (video)! And Fievel Goes West!

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By the way, in other contexts, syncro-vox can look pretty dark and creepy. For this, let me submit Captain Fathom (video), low budget cartoonage from the 60's, as my evidence. Makes me feel all swarthy just looking at it.. haha.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, very interesting post, greetings from Greece!