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Jul. 29th, 2009
Where the Hell is Matt *Really*?
Jul. 29th, 2009 02:58 pmA media studies moment for the 21st century.
December 11, 2008: Matt Harding, creator of the world-famous "Where the Hell is Matt?" YouTube videos, appears at The Entertainment Gathering in Monterey, CA. His presentation, riffing on the flood of clueless YouTube commenters who call *everything* cool a fake, is a 'confession' that the Where the Hell is Matt videos were an elaborate hoax involving greenscreen, photoshop, a 727 in a swimming pool, and a small army of animatronic puppets. The crowd enjoys the joke.
January 2, 2009: The aforementioned video appears on YouTube. A significant fraction of the internet, spiritual cousins to the YouTube commenters, fail to get the joke, and start spreading tweets, blog entries, and eventually news articles discussing this confession as if it was true.
January 7, 2009: Matt Harding appears at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, and explains in painful detail how the 'hoax' was the *confession*, not the original videos.
January 9, 2009: The MacWorld video goes up on YouTube.
Part of why the joke failed to be obvious to some people in the first video was that the final bit was a chart showing the budget for this 'hoax' which got compressed too far to read clearly. Here's a transcript for the visually-impaired:
December 11, 2008: Matt Harding, creator of the world-famous "Where the Hell is Matt?" YouTube videos, appears at The Entertainment Gathering in Monterey, CA. His presentation, riffing on the flood of clueless YouTube commenters who call *everything* cool a fake, is a 'confession' that the Where the Hell is Matt videos were an elaborate hoax involving greenscreen, photoshop, a 727 in a swimming pool, and a small army of animatronic puppets. The crowd enjoys the joke.
January 2, 2009: The aforementioned video appears on YouTube. A significant fraction of the internet, spiritual cousins to the YouTube commenters, fail to get the joke, and start spreading tweets, blog entries, and eventually news articles discussing this confession as if it was true.
January 7, 2009: Matt Harding appears at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, and explains in painful detail how the 'hoax' was the *confession*, not the original videos.
January 9, 2009: The MacWorld video goes up on YouTube.
Part of why the joke failed to be obvious to some people in the first video was that the final bit was a chart showing the budget for this 'hoax' which got compressed too far to read clearly. Here's a transcript for the visually-impaired:
"Where the Hell is Matt?" Budget Crab Wrangler $30,000 Robot Uprising Insurance $1,000,000 Hair Extensions $20,000 Hush Money $300,000 Animatronic Masseuse $60,000 Writer's Strike Delays $1,200,000 Bribes $2,500,000 Animatronic puppets $8,000,000 727 in a swimming pool $17,000,000 Puppet Storage $500,000 Stunt Double $50,000