WTF is Red vs Blue?

A few days ago I was talking to a colleague at work when I made an offhand reference to Red vs Blue. In response, I received a puzzled smile and an utterly blank stair. Now its worth mentioning that I get utterly blank stairs after about 90% of the things I say. I bit a thermometer in half and swallowed some mercury when I was young. That explanation usually suffices....

But on this particular occasion, I wasnt getting the "thats so great that he can feed and dress himself" look, rather one of genuine confusion. This person had no idea what in the world I was talking about with this whole Red vs Blue thing. And thats when I realized I had gone off into my little gamer bubble again, and that most people probably have no idea what Red vs Blue is. Whooops!

Well for starters, it has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, so put your mind at ease. In the simplest terms possible, Red vs Blue is an online show made by using in game footage from the Halo game series. The "filming" is then overdubbed with voices, and wa-la - a show is born. An example can, I'm sure, explain far better than my mercury laden words can.

Disclaimer: There might be a few obscenities in these movies - while not to the South Park degree of excessiveness, my lawlyers (get it?) insisted I post this disclaimer. =)

The entire process is known as Machinima (machine cinema), a subculture of film that was really brought into the limelight in America by the Red vs Blue series. All said and done, RvB ran for nearly 5 years, with more than 100 episodes before the creators called it quits - though they had a bit of a comeback tour with the release of Halo 3.

With its unprecedented popularity, the World of Warcraft universe has sparked hundreds of these sort of movies, though few have been more popular than the "Jimmy" series - the first episode (shown below) of which has gotten almost 3 million hits on youtube.

Now if havent played either Warcraft or Halo, then those movies will likely leave you on the outside looking in at a whole lot of inside jokes and references. And thus you have unmasked my secret plan to lower the self esteem of all non gamers ;-) No, not really.

The original purpose of this post was educational - to try and explain a part of the gaming/ film subculture that most "outsiders" don't know about. But I also think its worth noting that Machinima is just another way of talking about user created content - something that should mean more to the educators in the crowd than some film game hybrid word. RvB and Jimmy are popular in large part because of their humor, but thats not to say that humor is the only practical application for this sort of content.

Take it as you will =)

Both videos taken from youtube.com