WATCHFRIENDS - Observations in my quest to make a video someone hadn't already done

Over the last year or two, I've lost count of the number of times my friend Corey and I have come across a brilliant little video on YouTube and smacked our heads at the obviousness of it. "Why didn't we think of that?" is a commonly heard utterance.

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I thought it would be funny if there was zombie porn, and speculated on how ridiculous that might be. A Google search later than night brought no fewer than 115,000 hits for "zombie porn".

A few months back, my brother came up with what I thought was a hilarious idea for a video spoof. "Jihad Joe!" Brilliant! Al Queda toys! Later that night, I googled "Jihad Joe" and found dozens, if not hundreds of references to it. There were at least five really well done toy commercial parodies for Jihad Joe. My spirit was crushed.


Were there NO good ideas that haven't been done yet?

So last week the idea for WATCHFRIENDS struck me, and I still don't remember what the inspiration was. Maybe it was having seen the official Watchmen trailer for the hundredth time. Maybe I'd seen a reference to Hanna-Barbera earlier in the day. Who knows? But somehow the vision of the Watchmen trailer replaced with Super-Friends footage bloomed fully-formed in my brain.

And for the first time, a Google search turned up ZERO hits. I knew I had to act quickly.

The video I actually ended up creating turned out better than the one I was amusing myself with in my brain.

So, for at least this one time, I managed to be the first one with whatever stupid idea I came up with. I can rest easy... well, at least until I finish creating the first-ever WATCHSMURFS* trailer!






* There's no way I'm subjecting myself to dozens of ours of sifting through Smurfs episodes... If anyone reading this wants to attempt to do a WATCHSMURFS video, I give you my blessing... and my sympathy.