Where the Hell is Matt *Really*?

[alexxkay]

A 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:

"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

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

oh, my.

[nihilistech.livejournal.com]

Those numbers are obviously fake. Like the robot-uprising insurance and the hush-money numbers must have been switched.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

I really thought that $1M was rather cheap for robot uprising insurance, and if you put the "hush money" number in with the "bribes" number, it looks a lot more reasonable.

Probabilities

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I really thought that $1M was rather cheap for robot uprising insurance

Nah. The cost of paying out a claim is high, but the probability is pretty low.

Or, at least, most insurance companies will think it's low.

Re: Probabilities

[(Anonymous)]

Y'think? Few insurance company workers are AI/Robotics experts, but lots of them will have seen many movies and TV shows featuring such uprisings.

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

Fun fact: Mr. Harding used to be a game developer.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

(Alexx googles for more details..)

And hey! Some of the music for his videos is by Garry Schyman, who later did the music for BioShock. I suppose they must have met at Pandemic.

Back in 2003, 28-year-old Matt Harding discovered that irony has its limits. At the time he was working for a company in Brisbane, Australia, writing dialog for video game characters, but had tired of all the violent shoot-'em-up games, he said, and suggested, sarcastically, that the company develop a game called Destroy All Humans. Unfortunately, the company thought it was a great idea; Harding didn't. "I … didn't want to spend two years of my life writing a game about killing everyone," he said. "I [suggested the game] as a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing, but there is no such thing as irony in video games." So, he quit his job and took off on an around-the-world trip – a sojourn that would eventually make Harding a celebrity of sorts, at least among a crowd of seemingly irreverent Web-surfers who have flocked to his site, Where the Hell Is Matt?

http://www.webcitation.org/5ZDPxw6P5

I guess Matt hasn't yet learned his lesson about making jokes...

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Since you've been making a lot of media studies posts... http://rawles.livejournal.com/340736.html. Memorable post about feminism and racism and Star Trek XI. Made me sniffle.