Vid announcement: Highway Cafe of the Damned
Vid: Highway Café of the Damned
Vidders: jmtorres and niqaeli
Premiered at: vividcon '08
Fandom: Stargate (primarily SG-1, some of the original movie)
Download link: http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/highwaycafe.divx.zip (24.2MB)
Streaming on imeem: http://www.imeem.com/people/3W7JGFu/video/TM9rK0rl/
I think if anyone had realized how tongue-in-cheek this title card was, there would have been laughing earlier in the vid. You see, one of the things that comes up in the discussions of the History of Vidding is that many vidders have lineages. They were taught by more experienced vidders. They vidded in cabals *grin* This was more necessary when the technology to video edit was prohibitively expensive (ie, best afforded by a group). But yes. Many vidders will tell you who their teacher was, who their teacher's teacher was, and so on, back to the slide show days of Starsky and Hutch. Or so I hear. Ahem.
I was a feral vidder. I had no teacher. When I refer to the House of Torres, I mean myself, and niqaeli, who is my padawan, and occasionally grey_bard, who has a passing interest in my advice. Therefore neither of the adjectives "ancient" nor "venerable" are remotely accurate to describe the House of Torres.
I may be the only person on this Earth to whom this is funny. Certainly niqaeli was a little "whatever, dear, if it makes you happy" about it.
It does make me happy. I'm tattooing toreS tuq in Klingon script on my right hip.
So, like, two years ago I pitched "Highway Café of the Damned" to niqaeli and she'd never heard of the song, never heard of the band, but instantly, instantly understood that it was all about Daniel and that one time in season 8 and this is why the woman is my brain twin. It came up again this year when, about two weeks out from the submission deadline, my vidding drive died in a fire and took with it the Torchwood vid I'd been intending to turn into the Fuck You challenge (it was a fuck you to fandom. Oh, I'm not bitter, not at all). Too frustrated to attempt to recapture the hate, I sought something I could do quickly. And rope niqaeli into help on.
Honestly, ripping 26 episodes isn't that much to do if you know where you're going. Good thing we know the series like the back of our hand?
Mostly? It is the completely literal joke about Daniel in the Ascended halfway waffle house of the damned. But there's bits of it that are metaphorical, or things that we were trying to say about Ascension or Daniel's life or Daniel's deaths that I. I have a ridiculous amount of commentary on.
So the first verse is talking about where Daniel comes from and how he got to this point in his life. We introduced the stargate--figuring it out was Daniel's greatest, most life-changing, most damning accomplishment, and we were specifically using movie images to reference that, clips of the cartouche and identifying the home symbol on the monitor; and Abydos, which is the kick-off of the whole thing and became Daniel's home and remained important all throughout the Ascension arc; and the goa'uld and how the goa'uld represent both danger and temptation.
We also wanted to talk about Daniel's family in here, and Daniel's family as not just his family but a representation of the archaeological community of which he was once part and by which he is now mutually rejected. This is why we killed Mom; it's about Daniel turning aside from this career, this life, this person he used to be, and making another choice, which is sort of the first step down a slippery, sandy slope. (Well, that was one reason: the other is that violence is inherently funny. Mom's death was the first point at which people actually laughed during the showing of the vid, so we know we're right. Previously we'd had a clip about Daniel doing archaeological dig things--with small children, so he also looked like a pedophile, it was awful--in support of the discussion about his archaeological career but none of the betas were getting the metaphor and they weren't laughing either and the laughing was more important.)
This point about Daniel's career is why James Spader is in the vid, by the way: it's specifically the moment when he's talking about how the pyramids cannot possibly have been built when accepted theory states, and he burned his bridges and was forever branded with the "landing platforms for alien spaceships" thing. (Pop quiz: how many movie clips are in this vid? Answer: Seven. Can you identify them all?) Daniel: so crazy that his grampa who lives in an asylum thinks Dannyboy's the crazy one.
You may not recognize this clip from the "whiskey, beer and wine" bit as being from the episode Absolute Power, but it is, and that's important. (We originally had a clip of Bra'tac downing the ceremonial wine from Teal'c's kid's wedding rehearsal with this hilarious "why me?" expression, but we decided a) we needed more Daniel upfront, and b) Absolute Power: key.) Absolute Power is the episode in which Daniel is confronted with the wholesome benevolence of Oma Desala and Sha're's child Shifu, the only Ascended beings we'd met at this point, and Daniel wants the goa'uld technology, not the Ascended wisdom. He could fix everything if he just had the power. He comes to feel the same way about Ascended powers, ready to fix everything with a glowy wave of his hand, except the frustration there is not that they seem to be inherently evil, as the goa'uld power is, but that the Ascended race will let you do fuck-all with your shiny powers. So there's a lot of set-up
regarding Absolute Power, and Oma and Shifu's lessons, and the temptation of goa'uld technology versus other forms of power for Daniel. We used a clip of Daniel in the sarcophagus in an episode when it's literally an addiction for him, on the line "a smoke was my only friend." And we used Daniel walking through a wall in Oma Desala's temple on Kheb, cut directly into the Absolute Power vision where he wishes, oh he wishes, he could use a goa'uld hand device--while in the lyrics, "I wondered why I had come to no good end."
As long as Daniel thinks he can fix everything if he just has the right technology, the right powers, he can't win at this Ascension thing.
Then we get into bits that are obvious for a short while: Daniel's death at the hands of repliCarter leading up to his arrival in the halfway waffle house of the Ascended. Here it is: the Highway Café of the Damned. Yes, it really, really is. (Side note: do you remember Daniel's line about this being the place Nick took him after his parents' funeral? He had waffles. That's why waitress Oma brings him waffles now. Oh, Daniel, your trauma is eternal.)
I heard a couple of opinions during Vid Review that we should have cut the song, made the joke and gotten out (and one opinion from a non-SG1 fan that the length of the vid gave her time to get the joke and then enjoy it for the second half of the vid). Could we have? Maybe. We did think about cutting it, it seemed like there were so many choruses for one--but there are really only two of the standard chorus. Both of the ones at the end are modified choruses we were using for further points. And we did have so goddamned much we wanted to say.
During the verse describing the patrons of the Highway Café of the Damned, we wanted to talk about what it means to be Ascended, and how far you can push the Prime Directive, and what happens when you break the rules. Anubis (though we saved his identity for later) is very carefully pushing the non-interference as far as he can and no further: he's figured how out how much he can cheat the spirit within the letter of the rules. The damning thing about him is he's doing it for personal gain: this is why you must be careful about who you help to ascend (and why the Ascended race generally thinks nobody should be helped, people have to do it on their own). Orlin is the earliest object lesson in what happens if you, with all the best intentions, give technology to lower races in protection: they'll turn it against each other like the barbarians they are. So you're not allowed to try. (The Ascended race is very once burned, twice shy: there is no try, try again. And they will punish you for your mistakes in a way that makes you always remember it was a mistake and you should not ever, ever repeat it.) Daniel tries to explain Ascension to Jack and Jack gets frustrated with how Daniel won't do anything to help him, warned off by those who went before. The lack of doing gets to Daniel; Oma "tries to pitch the double wallop" to Daniel like Ascension's this gift but to Daniel it's so much snake oil. It's useless. You cannot save your friends, so what's the point?
During the bridge of the song, we did a segment we call Duelling Banjos, wherein Jack and Ascended!Daniel make hilarious faces and hand gestures at each other. ("His pointy hands!" niqaeli gasped at one point. In case I didn't mention, we were dying of laughter the entire time we were making this. Daniel falling over? Dead of laughter. Jack throwing a shoe? Snicker snicker snicker. Jack's eyebrow and Daniel's eyeroll? Oh, God, rolling in the aisles. We knew no one would ever find this vid as funny as we would. We're just glad people laughed at all.) This is a scene from Full Circle in which Daniel's begging Jack to deal with shit because the non-interference rules don't allow him to, and he's running up against how good grief, he could do more to save the people he cares about if he were human than he can as an Ascended being, and Jack keeps pointing out how very screwed up it is that Daniel has these cosmic powers and can't do anything.
By the way, a quick poll:
Poll Highway Cafe of the Damned
niqaeli views it as a gen vid all about Daniel and Daniel's trauma. jmtorres's default setting for SG1 is Jack/Daniel. So if the authorial intent seems a little muddy on the gay there, that may be why. P.S. Daniel TOTALLY comes back from being Ascended because of his deep, true love of Jack. All his important conversations about Ascension are with Jack, from the "It's what I want, I have to go now" to the "You gonna kick ass?" "If I have to." "Can you?" Also ask me about my theories on Absolute Power.
So anyway! Part of the next verse is how the Ascended beings in this place don't do anything, they just sit there. It's all they can do and it's driving Daniel crazy. (I also got all meta on LJ about how the Ascended plane == the Q continuum. I am a geekface. And how.)
And then we had the parade of Daniel's deaths. I mean, we had to do it at some point. For the curious, the string of clips here is:
I would have thrown in the movie but we were having the hardest time ripping that sucker.
I did have to think about Double Jeopardy. I mean, it wasn't really Daniel, it was Robot Daniel. But the rolling head got such a good laugh in beta. It was one of those awful things we had to do, like killing Mom.
I would just like to take a shallow, shallow moment to mention how thrilled I was at how the spinning order wheel played on the big screen. Sometimes it's the simple things in life.
For the first modified chorus ("Waitress, waitress, bring me some coffins,") niqaeli had the brilliantly wrong idea of talking about Abydos and the mass Ascension. I was frankly surprised at how much of a laugh this got at con: I knew that we were moving to more of a metaphor and I wasn't sure how transparent it would be to the audience.
Maybe the audience was just ready for a new gag? But, seriously, Oma Desala aiding in the Ascension of an entire planet runs so counter to what we know about the non-interference rules that I have this whole theory about how they're not fully Ascended, their planet has become a Highway Café holding area. They won't really be allowed out into the greater universe until they properly accept the EULA on the powers. Mind you, why Oma indulged Daniel on the "I will not let anyone from Abydos die!" thing, I do not know.
For the second modified chorus ("Waitress, waitress, bring me some Kafka") we did the reveal on annoying dude from the café being Anubis. Did we fake you out with how he went for that coffee pot? Did we?
The one thing I regret about this vid, that I didn't do anything about because nobody said anything in beta and I figured I shouldn't fiddle the thing to death if no one else thought it was a problem, was that I wanted to cut more of Daniel and Anubis's "Luke, I am your father!" fight from Full Circle into Oma and Anubis's glowy battle at the end here. Maybe that would have done something to combat the feeling that we were hitting the same joke for the fifth time? Who knows.
In conclusion, naked Daniel ftw. It is always funny, and I ask you. How is that not slashy?
So, to sum up: you are not wrong to look for context and subtext and metatext. While our primary goal was to make a funny vid and it thrilled us that people laughed, we also had a lot to say. We are deep and funny. Our vid contains multitudes.
Oh, and one other thing. There's a story that goes with it.
Vidders: jmtorres and niqaeli
Premiered at: vividcon '08
Fandom: Stargate (primarily SG-1, some of the original movie)
Download link: http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/highwaycafe.divx.zip (24.2MB)
Streaming on imeem: http://www.imeem.com/people/3W7JGFu/video/TM9rK0rl/
I think if anyone had realized how tongue-in-cheek this title card was, there would have been laughing earlier in the vid. You see, one of the things that comes up in the discussions of the History of Vidding is that many vidders have lineages. They were taught by more experienced vidders. They vidded in cabals *grin* This was more necessary when the technology to video edit was prohibitively expensive (ie, best afforded by a group). But yes. Many vidders will tell you who their teacher was, who their teacher's teacher was, and so on, back to the slide show days of Starsky and Hutch. Or so I hear. Ahem.
I was a feral vidder. I had no teacher. When I refer to the House of Torres, I mean myself, and niqaeli, who is my padawan, and occasionally grey_bard, who has a passing interest in my advice. Therefore neither of the adjectives "ancient" nor "venerable" are remotely accurate to describe the House of Torres.
I may be the only person on this Earth to whom this is funny. Certainly niqaeli was a little "whatever, dear, if it makes you happy" about it.
It does make me happy. I'm tattooing toreS tuq in Klingon script on my right hip.
So, like, two years ago I pitched "Highway Café of the Damned" to niqaeli and she'd never heard of the song, never heard of the band, but instantly, instantly understood that it was all about Daniel and that one time in season 8 and this is why the woman is my brain twin. It came up again this year when, about two weeks out from the submission deadline, my vidding drive died in a fire and took with it the Torchwood vid I'd been intending to turn into the Fuck You challenge (it was a fuck you to fandom. Oh, I'm not bitter, not at all). Too frustrated to attempt to recapture the hate, I sought something I could do quickly. And rope niqaeli into help on.
Honestly, ripping 26 episodes isn't that much to do if you know where you're going. Good thing we know the series like the back of our hand?
Mostly? It is the completely literal joke about Daniel in the Ascended halfway waffle house of the damned. But there's bits of it that are metaphorical, or things that we were trying to say about Ascension or Daniel's life or Daniel's deaths that I. I have a ridiculous amount of commentary on.
So the first verse is talking about where Daniel comes from and how he got to this point in his life. We introduced the stargate--figuring it out was Daniel's greatest, most life-changing, most damning accomplishment, and we were specifically using movie images to reference that, clips of the cartouche and identifying the home symbol on the monitor; and Abydos, which is the kick-off of the whole thing and became Daniel's home and remained important all throughout the Ascension arc; and the goa'uld and how the goa'uld represent both danger and temptation.
We also wanted to talk about Daniel's family in here, and Daniel's family as not just his family but a representation of the archaeological community of which he was once part and by which he is now mutually rejected. This is why we killed Mom; it's about Daniel turning aside from this career, this life, this person he used to be, and making another choice, which is sort of the first step down a slippery, sandy slope. (Well, that was one reason: the other is that violence is inherently funny. Mom's death was the first point at which people actually laughed during the showing of the vid, so we know we're right. Previously we'd had a clip about Daniel doing archaeological dig things--with small children, so he also looked like a pedophile, it was awful--in support of the discussion about his archaeological career but none of the betas were getting the metaphor and they weren't laughing either and the laughing was more important.)
This point about Daniel's career is why James Spader is in the vid, by the way: it's specifically the moment when he's talking about how the pyramids cannot possibly have been built when accepted theory states, and he burned his bridges and was forever branded with the "landing platforms for alien spaceships" thing. (Pop quiz: how many movie clips are in this vid? Answer: Seven. Can you identify them all?) Daniel: so crazy that his grampa who lives in an asylum thinks Dannyboy's the crazy one.
You may not recognize this clip from the "whiskey, beer and wine" bit as being from the episode Absolute Power, but it is, and that's important. (We originally had a clip of Bra'tac downing the ceremonial wine from Teal'c's kid's wedding rehearsal with this hilarious "why me?" expression, but we decided a) we needed more Daniel upfront, and b) Absolute Power: key.) Absolute Power is the episode in which Daniel is confronted with the wholesome benevolence of Oma Desala and Sha're's child Shifu, the only Ascended beings we'd met at this point, and Daniel wants the goa'uld technology, not the Ascended wisdom. He could fix everything if he just had the power. He comes to feel the same way about Ascended powers, ready to fix everything with a glowy wave of his hand, except the frustration there is not that they seem to be inherently evil, as the goa'uld power is, but that the Ascended race will let you do fuck-all with your shiny powers. So there's a lot of set-up
regarding Absolute Power, and Oma and Shifu's lessons, and the temptation of goa'uld technology versus other forms of power for Daniel. We used a clip of Daniel in the sarcophagus in an episode when it's literally an addiction for him, on the line "a smoke was my only friend." And we used Daniel walking through a wall in Oma Desala's temple on Kheb, cut directly into the Absolute Power vision where he wishes, oh he wishes, he could use a goa'uld hand device--while in the lyrics, "I wondered why I had come to no good end."
As long as Daniel thinks he can fix everything if he just has the right technology, the right powers, he can't win at this Ascension thing.
Then we get into bits that are obvious for a short while: Daniel's death at the hands of repliCarter leading up to his arrival in the halfway waffle house of the Ascended. Here it is: the Highway Café of the Damned. Yes, it really, really is. (Side note: do you remember Daniel's line about this being the place Nick took him after his parents' funeral? He had waffles. That's why waitress Oma brings him waffles now. Oh, Daniel, your trauma is eternal.)
I heard a couple of opinions during Vid Review that we should have cut the song, made the joke and gotten out (and one opinion from a non-SG1 fan that the length of the vid gave her time to get the joke and then enjoy it for the second half of the vid). Could we have? Maybe. We did think about cutting it, it seemed like there were so many choruses for one--but there are really only two of the standard chorus. Both of the ones at the end are modified choruses we were using for further points. And we did have so goddamned much we wanted to say.
During the verse describing the patrons of the Highway Café of the Damned, we wanted to talk about what it means to be Ascended, and how far you can push the Prime Directive, and what happens when you break the rules. Anubis (though we saved his identity for later) is very carefully pushing the non-interference as far as he can and no further: he's figured how out how much he can cheat the spirit within the letter of the rules. The damning thing about him is he's doing it for personal gain: this is why you must be careful about who you help to ascend (and why the Ascended race generally thinks nobody should be helped, people have to do it on their own). Orlin is the earliest object lesson in what happens if you, with all the best intentions, give technology to lower races in protection: they'll turn it against each other like the barbarians they are. So you're not allowed to try. (The Ascended race is very once burned, twice shy: there is no try, try again. And they will punish you for your mistakes in a way that makes you always remember it was a mistake and you should not ever, ever repeat it.) Daniel tries to explain Ascension to Jack and Jack gets frustrated with how Daniel won't do anything to help him, warned off by those who went before. The lack of doing gets to Daniel; Oma "tries to pitch the double wallop" to Daniel like Ascension's this gift but to Daniel it's so much snake oil. It's useless. You cannot save your friends, so what's the point?
During the bridge of the song, we did a segment we call Duelling Banjos, wherein Jack and Ascended!Daniel make hilarious faces and hand gestures at each other. ("His pointy hands!" niqaeli gasped at one point. In case I didn't mention, we were dying of laughter the entire time we were making this. Daniel falling over? Dead of laughter. Jack throwing a shoe? Snicker snicker snicker. Jack's eyebrow and Daniel's eyeroll? Oh, God, rolling in the aisles. We knew no one would ever find this vid as funny as we would. We're just glad people laughed at all.) This is a scene from Full Circle in which Daniel's begging Jack to deal with shit because the non-interference rules don't allow him to, and he's running up against how good grief, he could do more to save the people he cares about if he were human than he can as an Ascended being, and Jack keeps pointing out how very screwed up it is that Daniel has these cosmic powers and can't do anything.
By the way, a quick poll:
Poll Highway Cafe of the Damned
niqaeli views it as a gen vid all about Daniel and Daniel's trauma. jmtorres's default setting for SG1 is Jack/Daniel. So if the authorial intent seems a little muddy on the gay there, that may be why. P.S. Daniel TOTALLY comes back from being Ascended because of his deep, true love of Jack. All his important conversations about Ascension are with Jack, from the "It's what I want, I have to go now" to the "You gonna kick ass?" "If I have to." "Can you?" Also ask me about my theories on Absolute Power.
So anyway! Part of the next verse is how the Ascended beings in this place don't do anything, they just sit there. It's all they can do and it's driving Daniel crazy. (I also got all meta on LJ about how the Ascended plane == the Q continuum. I am a geekface. And how.)
And then we had the parade of Daniel's deaths. I mean, we had to do it at some point. For the curious, the string of clips here is:
- Fire and Water (flag folding)
- The Nox (staff weapon blast)
- Serpent's Lair (staff weapon blast)
- Need (rocks fall)
- Window of Opportunity (what kind of archaeologist carries a gun?)
- Double Jeopardy (the rolling head)
- Meridian (glow me.)
I would have thrown in the movie but we were having the hardest time ripping that sucker.
I did have to think about Double Jeopardy. I mean, it wasn't really Daniel, it was Robot Daniel. But the rolling head got such a good laugh in beta. It was one of those awful things we had to do, like killing Mom.
I would just like to take a shallow, shallow moment to mention how thrilled I was at how the spinning order wheel played on the big screen. Sometimes it's the simple things in life.
For the first modified chorus ("Waitress, waitress, bring me some coffins,") niqaeli had the brilliantly wrong idea of talking about Abydos and the mass Ascension. I was frankly surprised at how much of a laugh this got at con: I knew that we were moving to more of a metaphor and I wasn't sure how transparent it would be to the audience.
Maybe the audience was just ready for a new gag? But, seriously, Oma Desala aiding in the Ascension of an entire planet runs so counter to what we know about the non-interference rules that I have this whole theory about how they're not fully Ascended, their planet has become a Highway Café holding area. They won't really be allowed out into the greater universe until they properly accept the EULA on the powers. Mind you, why Oma indulged Daniel on the "I will not let anyone from Abydos die!" thing, I do not know.
For the second modified chorus ("Waitress, waitress, bring me some Kafka") we did the reveal on annoying dude from the café being Anubis. Did we fake you out with how he went for that coffee pot? Did we?
The one thing I regret about this vid, that I didn't do anything about because nobody said anything in beta and I figured I shouldn't fiddle the thing to death if no one else thought it was a problem, was that I wanted to cut more of Daniel and Anubis's "Luke, I am your father!" fight from Full Circle into Oma and Anubis's glowy battle at the end here. Maybe that would have done something to combat the feeling that we were hitting the same joke for the fifth time? Who knows.
In conclusion, naked Daniel ftw. It is always funny, and I ask you. How is that not slashy?
So, to sum up: you are not wrong to look for context and subtext and metatext. While our primary goal was to make a funny vid and it thrilled us that people laughed, we also had a lot to say. We are deep and funny. Our vid contains multitudes.
Oh, and one other thing. There's a story that goes with it.