Gee, my first cease and desist letter. How quaint.

[captainsblog]

If you use digg, or read the New York Times, or even occasionally peruse Wil Wheaton's blog, you know that there's a storm brewing over the latest attempt by The Man to protect the next generation of DVD technology from naughty hackers, the same ones who made hash of the current encryption system. The new code was cracked in February, and until recently about ten people knew about it. But by going nuclear on this small band of pirates and also their host sites, the MPAA has now sparked a revolution where the code has been defiantly reproduced, so much so that it now produces more than a million Google entries, mostly consisting of the 16 hexadecimal pairs and little if anything else.

In a few cases, as it was after the legal beatdowns of the last decryption, free-speakers have gotten creative. The original, and still-illegal to speak, DeCSS code has been reproduced entirely in haiku form, presented as a movie in an opening-scene-of-Star-Wars crawl, and worked into all genres of songs. So it goes for the newly cracked code: Youtube's first results for it include a loving folk version, a rapped edition and a movie trailer.

And, in a paragraph or so, mine own.

----

I do not, for a minute, recommend this movie. We tried it, thinking it might be in the black-humor tradition of something like Harold and Maude or The Loved One, but it turned out to be more of a black hole. Its title is Oh Dad, poor Dad, Mamma's hung you in the closet and I'm feelin' so sad, and that pretty much describes its plot- a cross-pollination of Psycho and Weekend at Bernie's, where Mom trucks Dad's dead body around for purposes best known, if at all, in her own addled head.  The film was adapted from a long-running off-Broadway play of that name, itself written as a lark at Harvard by a young author named Arthur Kopit (whose works also include The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis and Other Plays). Other than its obvious-to-forced avant-guardiness, I'm not sure I'm ready to plug his literature, either.

But its music, now that's something to recommend. Neal Hefti did the soundtrack, and you probably know him best for two things. One, his collaborations with Neil Simon on such Broadway shows as Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple (both becoming TV shows, the latter lasting for years on ABC and forever in TVLand). Perhaps even more famously, his other television theme, consisting entirely of the title of the show being repeated over and over and over:

Batman! (nana nana nana nana nana nana nana)
Batman! (nana nana nana nana nana nana nana)

::repeat ad nananauseum::

His Oh Dad theme worked the same way, and was just as infectious. So much so that even though I've only heard it once, when I saw the offending code the other day, the first thing that came into my mind was Hefti's choral theme song, repeating, over and over,

Oh Dad,
poor Dad,
Mamma's hung you in the closet and I'm feelin' so sad...

Thus it is, after all that setup, that I present the original soundtrack to the revolution. Which, if it won't be televised, will at least be available on HD-DVD:

0 nine,
F nine,
one one 0 two nine D seven four E three five B D eight,
Four one,
Five six,
C five six three five six eight eight C0-Hello, DVD!

::repeat ad nauseum until ceased and/or desisted::

Comments

[thunderemerald.livejournal.com]

Arthur Kopit also co-wrote a very strange "adaptation" of Phantom of the Opera, which bastardized the entire story but is otherwise more or less good.

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

HA! Well done, Sir!