Mom Vs. Anime || Webspinna Battle

Mom Vs. Anime || Webspinna Battle

Mom vs. Anime Webspinna

(As portrayed by Zander Ruiz and Rebecca Palica)

It was very interesting to see the ideas from Johnathon Letham’s The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism play out in this assignment. According to Letham, there’s no such thing as true originality in art. Artists often borrow from old works or lean on a previously digested knowledge of old media when creating new content; they steal and repurpose components of old art, sometimes doing so consciously but most often doing so unconsciously. We realized that the Webspinna Battle is all about this--stealing and repurposing old pieces of media. Every clip that we used turned from random clips on the internet to weapons that fueled our battle. “Mother Knows Best” from Disney’s Tangled changed from a manipulative mother’s song over her princess daughter to a statement of authority by a mother in battle with her anime-loving son.

We got together to discuss the different possibilities that we could use to accomplish this assignment. Once we started bouncing ideas off of each other, the vine “I have the power of God and Anime on my side” became a springboard for our creative endeavor. To expand on this outside source of media, we thought we could do Christianity versus Anime for this project, however, once we thought of this idea further, we decided to play it safe and not poke fun at a religion at a religious University. Especially when we so badly wanted to have humor in our project. So we ultimately decided to explore a narrative detailing the battle between a classic nit-picky mother versus the anime obsessed kid.

Finding a variety of clips that mention anime are very easy to come by on YouTube. You would have to actively avoid YouTube in order to not see a clip involving anime of some sort because it is talked about so much. One of our greatest struggles that we faced with this assignment was finding clips that would work to show a mother’s reaction to her son being overly keen on this subject. One of our characters had an ocean of references where our mother only had a puddle. At first, we thought that this struggle was due to how specific one of our characters were. However, in the end, this difficulty helped us push our creativity to think outside of the box. As seen in our performance, a reasonable portion of the anime character’s part was pulled from real anime scenes, for example, Dragon Ball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokemon. However, the character of the mother pulled movie scenes such as “mother knows best” from Disney’s Tangled and “I don’t care” from Blade Runner.