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October 12, 2004
A Second Round of Jibjab, Anyone?
In case you haven't seen it yet, the fine animators at Jibjab.com have come out with a parody of I Wish I was in Dixie as their second gift to the U.S. presidential campaign. Following the wildfire success of their previous parody of This Land Was Made for You and Me, expectations were certainly high for this latest release, It's Good to Be in DC. How does it hold up? It's funny, but not as funny as the This Land parody.
Part of it is simply measuring up to the expectations game -- you they know they can do something really witty, you expect their sophomore effort to be just as good. The tit-for-tat mocking of Bush and Kerry in "This Land" was priceless stuff, whereas the yuks in this one tend to focus on insinuating that various politicians are gay (or bi, in the case of a smoking jacket-sporting John McCain). Not exactly highbrow political wit, but there's something oddly satisfying about seeing John Ashcroft come out to his Beltway colleagues. The whole thing might have been a bit more effective if they tied the jokes more directly to actual politics, but hey, that's probably asking too much from a pair of guys who like to animate pictures of Bill Clinton getting slapped by Hillary -- three times, no less if you count the two new slaps in the latest cartoon.
At least this time around, the JibJab team seems to have picked a song with no copyright strings attached. As I reported not so long ago, the animators dodged a lawsuit from the publishers who owned the rights to This Land. They eventually resolved the dispute, and got a lot of free publicity out of it. But much of their previous success had to do with the fact that the cartoon was actually hilarious in its own right, publicity or not. This one, well, is just funny. Not sidesplittingly funny, but certainly worth a couple of rim shots... -andy
Posted by acarvin at October 12, 2004 9:40 AM
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