So during one of our long-distance-friend skype calls, my friend told me about a happy little accident which set me on this new hobby.
She loaded up an episode of Top Gear, famed British car show, but accidentally got the subtitles for Disney’s “Mulan” over top of it.
It produced some hilarious results, which the Top Gear subreddit loved.
She watched the whole episode like that and took screencaps throughout.
It brought a totally new meaning to the show of course.
So as she was telling me about this, my runaway brain began working on intentionally recreating this effect.
After some thought, I figured I’d need something to call it. Juxtasubbing: watching a movie with another movie’s subtitles.
You load up the film and manually use another film’s subtitles- you play them together from the start, sit back, and take screenshots.
My first experiment with this was to juxtasub Scott Pilgrim and Fight Club, that is to say, I watched Scott Pilgrim with the subtitles for Fight Club overlaid.
It was quite challenging, as I was essentially watching two films at the same time (I know Fight Club so well that I was seeing it in my mind’s eye and hearing the dialogue as I read the subtitles). This was exhausting for one not practiced in this strange new form of movie watching. I’ll get better at it, I’m sure, but for now, I had to watch it in fits and starts.
I hit play, and looked for places where the subtitles created different meaning to the visuals on screen, or where they lined up in serendipitous ways. I didn’t jump around or alter this in any way; if you play Fight Club and Scott Pilgrim at the same time, you’ll get these same results.
Also, SPOILERS! If you haven’t seen Scott Pilgrim and/or Fight Club, this juxtasub will spoil parts of them for you! I’ll keep them to a minimum in this blog post, but I’ve included a link at the end to the full album and that is spoiler city!
And also this post is NSFW for language.
Onwards.
Pleasingly, the dream sequences lined up.
Then things started to make crazy sense.
And sometimes just little things would be brought together, like foreshadowing relationship problems between Scott and Knives.
Sometimes the fight scenes matched up, including the first one of each film.
And then this little sequence was too perfect (extra good because Wallace is gay, Scott Pilgrim is not):
There are tons more of course.
Full album is here if you want it. (Like I said though, SPOILER CITY!)
So that’s Juxtasubbing. I am going to experiment with it some more. If you do, I hope you’ll share the results! The possibilities are endless. Mash any two films together and see what happens. We’re bound to find some delightful matchups.
If you’d like another movie-related thing to read, check out my post Aspect Ratio Madness!
Have fun! Thanks for reading.
Heidi out.
H.G. Bells 