Song Saturday: Disney Style (Upular)
The Internet sure has changed the Disney community, hasn’t it? Once, we were just a bunch of scattered people in America (with a few obsessive Disneyana fans in California) who kept to ourselves about our love for Disney. After all, there was nobody to relate to. With the advent of the World Wide Web, we can share our love for all things Disney related. The community has grown so big that the bond the fans have with each other is stronger than the company itself! One man, using his love of all things nostalgic, combined the use of the Internet “Youtube Poops” and remixes to create something for the company itself! And here we have Upular, the Pixar remix by Pogo!
It’s really hard to describe a Pogo song to a first-time listener. There aren’t really lyrics, well there are, except they’re not grammatical sentence structures. It does follow the standard song structure of stanzas and choruses, however. The best I can describe it is a Youtube Poop and remix of the Pixar film, Up. For those of you who don’t know, a Youtube Poops are when you dramatically edit the audio and place them in a random order, set to a rhythm or beat. What Pogo does is that he takes random clips of dialogue or music, sets it to a beat and add in a couple of different musical tunes, and creates a song out of it.
The way Pogo does this makes them sound very dream-like and soothing. The tune itself is an original piece of music that he constructs using all these audio clips and when played together, it sounds very much like ambient music. Or like very soothing background music that can really calm your soul from its nonsensical nature.
What makes this man different from the others is that he focuses on these remixes and these remixes only. They’ve got a very unique style (just like how Disney animation had its own “Disney style” when it came to characters and settings) that others can’t replicate. He’s a very clean-cut individual and that’s why Disney chose him to make an Up song for them. Disney realized how popular remixes such as Alice, Wishery and Expialidocious were, so Disney decided to recruit him to appeal to the Internet generation. This is kind of important because it’s one of the first times that Disney fully embraced the creativity that the Internet had to offer and used it as a successful marketing technique.
I know it worked on me.
So go ahead, give it a listen, and check out some of Pogo’s other stuff! My favorites are Alice, Murmurs of Middle-Earth, Toyz Noise and Scrumdiddlyumptious.
Be Fantasmic!
-Wizard Victor
Victor Kong is an animator and a writer/correspondent for DAPs Magic, regularly posting Song Saturday (Disney Style) on DAPs Magic Geeks Corner, as well as covering local conventions, expos, and festivals. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
