The internet is determined to show how every movie and TV series would’ve ended in 2007
The latest meme turns all media into a rehash of the 2007 Transformers' Linkin Park end credits
Film Features The Lord of the Rings
The world was a very different place in 2007. In that seemingly distant past, the middle class believed they could still buy a house someday, most of us didn’t know what a coronavirus was, and, most alien of all, fading into Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” for a movie or TV show’s end credits was still considered a pretty cool thing to do.
In an effort to imagine a popular culture that always understood the power of this choice—one that places all work beneath the shadow of the stirring, robot-narrated conclusion to Michael Bay’s Transformers—the internet has been remixing every conceivable film and show ending to create an alternate, “What I’ve Done”-soaked reality.
The best way to show how effective this kind of edit can be is to start with its finest implementation so far: Jack Aling’s “The Godfather but it came out in 2007.”
Every version of the meme follows this same template. The last scene in a movie or TV series is shown and the song begins to play just before the credits start rolling.
There are tweets that show us Linkin Parkified versions of Drive My Car, Knives Out, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Game Of Thrones, E.T., and The Lord Of The Rings. There are others that give this treatment to The Sopranos, Star Wars, Citizen Kane, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Goodfellas, and Midsommar.
The format works across almost every application. But some of the best—like @mauro_text’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jill Krajewski’s Breakfast Club ending, Andrew Bergamo’s No Country For Old Men, @sflnino’s Chinatown, @lukemuniz_’s The Passion Of The Christ, and Jackson McMurray’s The Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat Station—turn the idea into something sublime.
Eventually, network and production company brand accounts will start putting these out for themselves and a nice joke will be ruined. But, in the meantime, we can continue to enjoy an actually good meme format being used just a little while longer.
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49 Comments
I prefer the Walk of Life project myself.
That’s because that song (or really any other song on “Brothers in Arms”) is always worth listening to.
Fun. Check out the full lyrics for Money for Nothin and enjoy the liberal use of the F word.
You are missing the point of that song if you think it is homophobic — it is *mocking* the people who were uncomfortable with gay rock stars.
Also, say what else you will about the use of that word, ‘liberal’ is a little bit of a stretch. It occurs, like, a couple of times in one verse, it’s not like the whole song is a cluster-bomb of homophobic slurs.
Also fair. I retract the majority of my comment.
Not my reading of it, but I understand what you’re saying, and it makes sense.
Aye, I came in here to say this is just a poor man’s Walk of Life project. Which also did Chinatown and did it better.
Came to say this. I was hoping this was some creative exercise in how shows might have played out if not for the 2007 writer’s strike.
At least you spelled ‘Linkin Park’ and ‘What I’ve Done’ right this time, unlike your colleague…https://gizmodo.com/but-it-came-out-in-2007-meme-the-godfather-lincoln-park-1849452372
I was tired of this meme after about 3 minutes. And that was like a week ago.
Am I so out of touch?…
This time it really is the children who are wrong.
It usually is, but no one wants to tell them because children are fucking mean.
I feel ya. I felt the same about the Morbius memes (“It’s Morbin’ time!”, etc) almost immediately after that became a thing.
Is it me, or does Linkin Park feel a bit…monochromatic? .(Checks internet)….Oh, the irony-Mike Shinoda thought metal was too white before Nu Metal. I guess I got it backwards.https://www.nme.com/news/music/linkin-parks-mike-shinoda-says-metal-felt-too-white-before-nu-metal-2794488
It’s a good song and it actually fits some of those movies.
The Godfather one is very very good and that should have probably been the end of it.
This is a bad sign. If people are already ironically nostalgic for Michael Bay’s Transformers, it won’t be long before they’re unironically nostalgic for Michael Bay’s Transformers.
Pretty much everybody who watched the sequels was unironically nostalgic for the first Transformers movie.
oof
Bumblebee didn’t make me nostalgic for the 1st Transformers movie, it made me sad the 1st movie wasn’t as good.
This is how it always starts. Someone in the comments going “honestly this ending do be slappin tho” (they’re 16). Then before you know it, they’re 25 and it’s suddenly a “classic.”
Next thing you know you got people on YouTube saying the Star Wars prequels were not complete shit
And then the survivors will envy the dead!
They’re weirdly being remembered well now, by people who were very little kids at the time I am guessing.
I get it. You can call it nostalgia but you can’t blame people. Those movies were a big deal at release, even if they were less and less happily received. Plus going to see a movie a theater as a kid is always an experience that can easily imprint on a young person. And to be honest, the prequels aren’t 100% bad. There were some nuggets of cool in their. I’d honestly rewatch them over Rise if Skywalker which was just such a mess of a movie that somehow managed to please no one.
I think the bulk of material that has entered the cultural lexicon since then allows people to watch those older things with a new perspective they didn’t realize they had. It’s why Star Trek the Motion Picture is rising in many people’s lists of good Star Trek Movies.
Before social media there were big name critics who colored opinions of movies and in the age of the internet we have huge levels people rushing out to get their opinions and pick apart nearly everything. As time passes and that hyper focused criticism fades into the past people will catch something again and form a fresh personal opinion which may reinforce their previous one or contradict it. We’re all subtly influencing each other and most of our opinions of media are formulated that way currently.
they were shit but they were george lucas’s vision dammit
Quiton Reviews already made one such video, and Hbomberguy has been working on one since forever. His fans are actually getting quite impatient for it, especially since it also means delaying his inevitable “Zack Snyder is the best modern director” video.
I actually knew that there is a movement. It’s funny because it’s very easy to track what is going on. For the later half of Millenials and very early Gen Z, those Star Wars prequels may be the first movies they remember seeing in theaters. For the later generations they grew up on them. Despite my generations general dislike of them(I was born at the very end of Gen X) we still managed to owned them on DVD and threw them on for our kids, younger siblings and cousins. And for all their faults they are still well made and well shot. The CGI has aged terribly though. Now Zack Snyder as a great director is a bridge to far
That tracks, Hbomb and Quinton are about 30 and were teens in the 2000s. In the case of Hbomb though, it also appears he’s a fan of Lucas (and Snyder) because he’s both a movie enthusiasts and politically leftist.
Are there parts of the internet that consider Snyder’s work leftist? Because I would love to hear what that take is, seems nearly 100% counter to how I see Snyder’s movies but maybe I am missing something.
A significant part of his fandom are progressive and queer. I think his leftist following mostly began when they notice 300 had some not-very-positive depictions of Spartans not from the source material, like how the entire movie was basically framed as a propaganda story or how they are depicted too casually killing babies and ousting the disabled from their ranks. Then you have his DC movies depicting Kryptonian imperialism, the American military and Batman’s W. Bush-era unilateralism in negative light. His strongest anti-fash movie is surprisingly his only animated kid’s movie so far, Legend of The Guardians (the owl movie). He also once dismissed Ayn Rand’s ideology, a favorite of people with fascist inclinations, even though he said he loved The Fountainhead’s story.
People who says the first Transformer movie was bad, need to reevaluated themselves. People who says the sequel was good, need to check their mental health.
For years people were telling me, “the first one was good, then they went downhill”. I watched the first one and it was fucking terrible.Next you’ll be saying the first Scary Movie was good.
Or maybe it’s like Morbius where people ironically like something but unironically will not watch that shit so it crashes and burns?
Linkin Park for the soundtrack was one of the best decisions they made regarding the movies, that and Peter Cullen. They really could have used more of the that.
Though I think a lot of fondness for the cartoon series is built upon nostalgia that’s best left in the past. The first movie was probably as about as good as I think it could be given the trends of the time and source material.
The type of people who worship A24 and quote Zizek relentlessly have been loving these movies since 2007. Also, people who were children back then. Related: I remember a review on an animation site of a The Transformers DVD boxset, which began with asking “how did a cartoon with animation and writing this bad launched a franchise?”.
That happened years ago.https://www.scribd.com/doc/210677266/I-actually-kind-of-appreciate-the-Transformers-moviesEven beyond film analysis, collectors are still demanding updated toys of the movie characters. Most of the big ones have by this year, and all but two of the major 2007 characters have Masterpiece figures.
“Eventually, network and production company brand accounts will start putting these out for themselves and a nice joke will be ruined.”I mean, the joke is ruined the moment you see a second one of these. You’ve ruined the fuck out of it by posting like twenty of ’em!
Adequate job internet.
Remember when “Greta Job Internet” featured cool amateur documentaries on YouTube or careful crafted oral histories of some piece of pop culture?Should just rename this category “Last weeks lazy memes”
Greta Job Internet is over at Earther…thanks, I’ll be here all week.
About a decade ago, a dude I know who I used to freelance at Cracked at the same time as did the same thing but with Danza Kuduro, like the end of Fast Five. It was magical.
The Chinatown one was really effective.
This is so very stupid. What does a movie coming out in 2007 have anything to do with that song? It’s not like there was a whole host of films using that song that year – it was just this one dumb movie.
They are alternate universes where those movies were released instead of Transformers.
In other words, “The ‘Walk of Life’ Project but it’s done in 2022.”