Marian Call and the Space Weird Thing

You might recognize Marian Call as the main figure in the above image. She's one of our favorite people on Twitter and in our earbuds; we've even had the pleasure of hanging out with her at SDCC and ECCC. You might also recognize a younger David Bowie in the inset of the above image. And, maybe, you've correctly identified it as coming from Bowie's 1969 music video for "Space Oddity." However, unless you're on Marian's mailing list, or connected with one of her loyal fans, you might not know just what the two nearly mirror images have to do with each other.

Well, I'm going to tell you.

Several days ago, I received Marian's latest newsletter email. It contained info about upcoming appearances, a new album in the works, and a video oddity. Regarding that last item, it seems that Marian got together with Alaska Robotics, Molly Lewis, and Seth Boyer to make a video. And they didn't do just any ol' video. No, they went and sweded the aforementioned music video for "Space Oddity"! Oh, and on top of that, they redid the lyrics so as to use only the 1000 most used words in English (see Randall Munroe's Up-Goer Five on xkcd.com).

Now, in case you're not familiar with the concept of sweded films, it refers to the recreation of popular pop-culture films using limited budgets and technology -- mainly a handheld camcorder and whatever odds and ends you can scrape together as props. It has been heralded as "the end of Hollywood as we know it," and the term has its roots in the 2008 film, Be Kind Rewind. And, lo, a pop-culture phenomenon was born!

But back to Marian Call and the point of this entry...

If you see only one music video this month, or one sweded film this month, it really should be this one. I mean, c'mon, even David Bowie's website is promoting it!

See also:

• Alaska Robotics
• Molly Lewis
• Seth Boyer