The Gendered Advertising Remixer

The Gendered Advertising Remixer was created by pop culture hacker and video remix artist Jonathan McIntosh.

Through two interactive websites (one about generic toys, another specifically about LEGO), users can mix and match toy commercials, playing videos aimed at girls while hearing the sound of commercials aimed at boys (and vice versa).

On his website, Jonathan explains his motivations for starting this project:

Young people in the United States are subjected to an average of 25,000 TV commercials every year. Embedded in those advertisements are a very regressive and stereotypical set of social values about gender roles for boys and girls. So how can kids push back against a multibillion dollar corporate marketing machine? The goal of this project is to help empower youth of all genders to better understand, deconstruct and creatively take control of the highly gendered messages emanating from their television sets. […] Over the past 5 years I’ve been recording TV commercials and using them in educational remixing workshops. I’ve found that fair-use remix video can be a fantastic way to combine critical media literacy, technical skills and creative play to help youth understand, deconstruct and remix mass media messages about gender roles.

I have spent the past half hour playing with Jonathan’s G.A.R. – with amusing results.

My suggestion:

• try a mashup of the video of the Barbie Glitter commercial with the sound of Star Wars the Clone Wars pistols
• try a mashup of the video from LEGO Kingdoms with the sound of a LEGO friends commercial

Speaking of the latter example, I was particularly amused during the sweet voice-over narration of the young girl in the LEGO Friends commercial: while describing the LEGO Friends café, she cheerfully says, “Our First Customer!” At that very second, in the video from LEGO Kingdoms, you see an armed soldier falling down a trap. I replayed it three times and it made me laugh out loud every single time.

Kudos to Jonathan McIntosh for creating such a thought-provoking project.

Links:

• The HTML5 Gendered Advertising Remixer
• The HTML5 Gendered LEGO Advertising Remixer
• Jonathan McIntosh’s website: Rebellious Pixels

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