#maxtrax

So...it's Ten-out-of-ten day, huh?

See, I thought of this bit, like a week or two ago, about having today be dedicated to a TRULY perfect rip, in commemoration of the date. But that obviously landed me in a bit of a dilemma...what IS a perfect rip? Can I even label just one SiIvaGunner rip as perfect without having that assessment be persuaded by my subjective feelings? Whichever rip I pick, will it not be criticized for its imperfections? One could say I was in a bit of a mental freeze...and just like that, it hit me. The one rip on SiIvaGunner that we can all agree upon is perfect. Kermit in the Ocean.

MaxTrax released this legend of a rip with a rather small backlog of prior-made rips, many of which released during Season 1. And while Season 1 was generally filled with a lot of repetitious content, it was simultaneously one of the most experimental times in SiIva's life, which brought us MaxTrax's first masterpiece - Main Theme - Yoda Stories. The rip features a somewhat-off-model Yoda hand puppet miming out performances of several mainstay SiIva jokes, all completely unedited in audio. I still have memories of seeing the rip premiere and being just as flabbergasted as everyone else - it was really just four minutes of watching a Yoda puppet make funny faces to the memes we all loved, and that alone made the rip strangely alluring. Akin to Sex - Steve Harvey, it was as if we'd been given a peek into just how stupid SiIvaGunner could get - it was a complete subversion of everything the channel stood for, yet it remained hilarious althesame.

Five years later in Season 5, we'd receive its spiritual successor - Kermit in the Ocean. I already discussed Astronaut in the Ocean in-depth on my post on Aquarium in the Ocean - the meme that rose to infamy during Season 5, only to gradually becoming accepted by the fanbase as the lesser, more chill of two evils. By the time this rip was uploaded, we had already begun coming to terms with the astronaut's permanent stay - and Kermit in the Ocean felt like the cherry on top to make that official. The rip covers Rainbow Connections, a song from The Muppets Movie sang by Kermit, with all the lyrics replaced to be those from Astronaut in the Ocean,. Althewhile, the singer sounds like he's having the absolute time of his life, and the off-model Kermit muppet accompanying it all looks as if its ready to shrivel up and die at any time. Its such a leap forward compared to Main Theme - Yoda Stories - the hysterical visual editing, the always present muppet and vocals, and of course the tonal dissonance between Astronaut in the Ocean's lyrical genius and the emotional resonance of Rainbow Connections.

Remember those times where I've mused on just how interesting it is to fall into rabbitholes from running this blog? Y'know, with waterwraith pokos - a rip I once thought nothing of that refuses to leave my head since I learned more about its joke origin and spread. There's a good number more rabbitholes just like it, yet few have truly caught my attention quite the way Plantasia 2 did. And, beyond it too being a rip of Pikmin 2, the strangest part of it all is - it hardly feels as if the rip itself even *wanted* to be uncovered.

I'm half certain that I myself missed out on the rip's core premise from tabbing out after listening for a bit, because it presents itself as so innocuously. A track as immediately distinct and identifiable in sound as Results of the Day, melody swapped to some classic SiIva jokes: Among Us Drip, Grand Dad, Nutshack - Oh what silly whimsy, what hijinx! An everyday, standard, good-quality rip to send to your Pikmin-interested friends as an icebreaker, without much else to it - and that's the way it stays for almost two whole minutes of its runtime. Click, laugh at the bait-and-switch joke, move on - the typical rip listening experience for many viewers (or at least myself) truly doesn't do Plantasia 2 justice.

Because, as you yourself may have noticed - at the minute-fifty timestamp, the rip hard-pivots in direction, to the point of even getting original visuals, all in loving tribute to the 1976 album Mother Earth's Plantasia by Mort Garson. If you're unfamiliar, I don't blame you, but just a quick glance at both him and his album's Wikipedia pages will tell you just how much of a legacy they both have. With the intent of making music specifically for plants to listen to, to the point of only distributing the album alongside purchases of houseplants from the titular Mother Earth store, Mother Earth's Plantasia was one of the first albums to have ever been composed entirely on a Moog synthesizer - purely for the listening pleasure of plant-life. In other words: It's pretty important to the history of synthesized music in general! Beyond that historical angle, it of course helps that the title track Plantasia, the one that Plantasia 2 is an arrangement of in particular, is absolutely soul-cleansingly beautiful, with an opening prelude that immediately brought to mind everything from Final Fantasy to Minecraft, yet building to a triumphant crescendo that reminded me of We're Finally Landing of SummoningSalt-video fame. The influences taken from Mother Earth's Plantasia can be felt everywhere, yet the root of it all feels all too forgotten about.

To say that Pikmin is the perfect franchise to use for this kind of tribute would be an understatement - the synth-driven Results of the Day theme has persisted with the series since its very beginning, conveying the beauty of space within a game otherwise so focused on exploring beautiful gardens. It's as if its conveying a sort of juxtaposition between the two sides to Pikmin's world, ytet the feeling that both it and the original Mother Earth's Plantasia convey is also one of connection between the two. The plants looking to the stars, to other unknown life beyond planet earth, longingly dreaming about the universe...the Pikmin are just little plant guys, and yet a theme like Results of the Day sparks so many emotions. I can't help but feel yet more emotional thinking about the humble, pure-hearted upbringings of both Pikmin and Mother Earth's Plantasia - both Shigeru Miyamoto and Mort Garson sought to create something out of a love for nature itself moreso than fame and fortune, and in doing so helped move their respective mediums forward in thoroughly underappreciated ways.

MaxTrax's list of contributions to the SiIvaGunner channel is comparatively small, with him seemingly ebbing in and out of activity practically every other year. Yet that gives me the impression that he genuinely puts his whole heart into each contribution he makes, to share these small, niche little nuggets of his interests to the broader SiIvaGunner audience; much the same impression I got from the ripper Uncle Fill in Violet Snow Memories. For MaxTrax, Plantasia doesn't appear to just be some neat song to tinker around with for another rip - Plantasia 2 exudes that feel of being a genuine passion project, akin to rips like Jesus of the Underground. Yet, much like Mother Earth's Plantasia or Pikmin itself, it also seems perfectly content in not being a big, explosive, all-eyeballs-on-me event of a release: the ones who are going to notice the true intentions of Plantasia 2 are the Pikmin fans who were going to listen to it the whole way through anyway.