#minindo

Way early into the blog's life, on the 20th of July 2023, I covered the rip Everything Circus - a Season 2 rip featuring one of my all-time favorite channel memes, hhgregg. I didn't cover all too much on the guy back then beyond the basics: The source was sparingly used in Season 1, then gradually received an uptick in popularity until finally earning himself a full-on channel event in Season 5. Last, we covered a rip from before this uptick - now, I think its only fair we tackle one that shows the fruits of that initiative.

The hhgregg meme was one of many that I only discovered through SiIvaGunner, yet it was far from the first to actually popularize it: HydroDalek's "doin" YTPMV was uploaded a year prior to SiIvaGunner's premiere, and sits at a 1.5 million views as of writing, and is of course paired with the excellent remix "ReDoin" by JerryTerry, made two years later, sitting at 2.4 million. hhgregg's infamous attempt at creating a memorable mascot for their brand seemed to at first be met with nothing more than annoyance, only for a subset of internet users to slowly mutate feelings into feelings of...affection, I suppose. Either way, as someone entirely out of the loop on all things relating to American retailers, that affection definitely rubbed off on me - after just being exposed to a small handful of rips, and then later being led to the rabbithole of YTPMVs dating back to 2014, I was hooked on the guy.

And its not something I believe I can put quite so easily into words, either, beyond pointing you to a rip like Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source for a direct demonstration. Wally Wingert is an excellent actor and performer in perhaps everything BUT his role as singing for hhgregg's Christmas sales of the summer season - yet YTPMVers throughout the last decade have been able to put those vocals, and vocals from the hhgregg mascot's entire television career, to incredible use. It's almost comparable to PSY in what I wrote about him in Korean Idiot - manipulation of hhgregg's distinctively nasally, yet self-assured voice has effectively become an instrument all of its own.

Pair that with the hyperactive yet constantly rhythmic and engaging flow of much of Touhou's music, Nostalgic Blood of the East ~ Old World not excluded, and you get something truly special. Yet the crazy thing is, Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source was but one of several other incredible rips utilizing the source during Season 5. It was, after all, his long-overdue event - the long-awaited Christmas in July - and the amount of rips that went completely above and beyond just as Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source did was absolutely remarkable. Speaking as someone who used to get hyped up back during the early days of seeing...what, the fourth or fifth ever hhgregg rip be uploaded? It did genuinely bring me so much excitement to finally see the most underrated SiIvaGunner source get the spotlight all to himself. hhgregg is, in all honesty, an oft-overlooked titan of recent YTPMV culture, a shining example of just how far some crazy cool people are able to take a series of voice clips that only initially spread online out of distaste.

Y'know, I thought long and hard about what rip to return to the blog with, a month away from it all. At first I felt like doing something grand and triumphant, something truly important to the channel's legacy like a Season premiere or finale, something in the spirit of A love letter to this wonderful community and my amazing friends or File Select Fusion Collab. But then I started going down the opposite path, maybe to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World post and by extension the one-year anniversary of this whole blog, I ought to feature something just as irony-filled, a subversion of all your expectations, a big meme-fest all around. That was appealing in some way, but both of these ideas felt like two opposite-end extremes of SiIvaGunner's whole, neither felt like the right way to truly embody what I love about the channel enough to be befitting for the blog's "revival." And it was then that I realized that the most explosive way I could return with was with something I'm truly passionate about, something I've had bubbling internally as something I've wanted to cover ever since the beginning, but never found the right opportunity to truly get into. A feature months in the making, is at last here.

That's right - it's time to finally talk about The Legend of Cage, and The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll.

A lot of what makes SiIvaGunner such a rewarding channel to follow is how well it remembers... just about every one of its thousands upon thousands of loose threads, ones woven since all the way back in 2016. It's as if every rip posted on the channel is bound to end up receiving some sort of tribute years down the line a la Violet Snow Memories, or alternatively rips lead to in-jokes perpetuated by individual rippers that then end up catching on as background gags alongside the channel's typical operations like with guess what​?​?​?​?​?​?​?​?. And due to its nature of allowing just about anything from anyone to be uploaded, Season 1 was when this was at its absolute peak - so many of the channel's ongoing running gags began all the way back during its first year due purely to the whims of individual rippers. The joke with The Legend of Cage stems from an in-joke with content creator Criken, wherein one thing led to another and after three years of development we'd end up receiving a texture pack wherein all faces in the game were replaced with variations of Nicholas Cage. The year was just the same as SiIvaGunner Season 1 - 2016 - and just a few weeks after the texture pack released, the joke breached the Vinesauce barrier through a stream by Vinny - and barely a week after that, the SiIvaGunner member kyokuP struck gold with Cage Town, First Day. It was hardly amidst Season 1's most popular videos - after all, it required knowledge of like three seperate rabbitholes of in-jokes and investment into Vinny Vinesauce's most recent streams at the time, but it was a bit that wound up sticking - as Season 1 progressed, more and more Majora's Mask videos wound up releasing, almost all of which continued the bit that kyokuP started.

Like a lot of these less-prominently-pushed Season 1 bits, it wound up falling to the wayside as the channel moved on with a more narrowed focus during Season 2. But, as is always the case, the SiIvaGunner team never forgets, there's always SOMEONE on there who's attached to the silliest of things - and one legend by the name of GramBam36 took it upon himself at the start of Season 3 to bring back The Legend of Cage-posting in full force. From Season 3 onward, due in huge part to the enthusiasm expressed by one of the channel's coolest rippers (seriously, this is now my 7th post on a Grambam36 rip, SUNGORE and this are only scratching the surface), one of the channel's most bizarre jokes was back on its feet - two years later, the original Criken bit, the Vinesauce stream that inspired it, had all been mostly forgotten, yet the show kept going on. Rip by rip, slowly, the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask grew closer and closer to completion, each of its many tracks given a Cage-ification due purely to the commitment to the bit. And, again, to reiterate: No special attention was being drawn to these rips whatsoever. Like with Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix] and so many other nuggets in SiIvaGunner's back catalogue, this was purely a passion project underway as the channel's gears kept turning at standard speed. That was, at least, until the final stretch of Season 6, and the SiIvaGunner All-Star Nuclear Winter Festival.

The Nuclear Winter Festival (aka "DoomFes") is a whole other can of worms to get into that's far too large for the scope of this post, but the most important throughline to it (and the Season as a whole) was a sense of...bittersweet finality, for lack of a better word. We all knew deep down that the channel itself wasn't ending, but every part of DoomFes felt specifically focused on tying up loose ends, giving us closure to threads left dangling for all too long. The Metal Gear SGFR album, Paper Jams, the SiIvaGunner AI storyline a whole, all things that felt like coming full circle at long last - and, amidst it all, was a silly little event focused on a 6-year old channel in-joke finally reaching its climax. With The Legend of Cage: Beneath the Mask Official Soundtrack, and with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll, it was finally time to finish off what was started all those years ago. The joke of putting Nicholas Cage textures into Majora's Mask had taken three years to realize - and after double that time, the SiIvaGunner team was at last able to match the texture pack's visuals with something just as quality in a full-soundtrack remix album, with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll sitting as the proud crescendo to it all.

It's easy to forget all of this borderline-sappy lore when actually experiencing the rip in question - It is, for all intents and purposes, the culmination of six years worth of Cagey goodness. Led by Grambam36 alongside incredible rippers like minindo of Beautiful Dreamer fame, we're at last given a The Legend of Cage rip with full-on YTPMV visuals, in turn helping depict the rip as a journey throughout the entirety of Majora's Mask, as its medley-like nature of Majora's Mask Staff Roll theme allows it to revisit some of the all-time classic Cageposts very seamlessly. It feels celebratory, of course, due to the very tone of the Staff Roll theme in general, but also due to all the aforementioned context of where Cage-posting was on SiIvaGunner during Season 6 - this event, the one effectively marking its death, was the first time this dumb running gag had really been given special attention by the channel, yet that was part of what made it all so special. I wasn't an "avid" listener of these per se as someone who hasn't played Majora's Mask myself, but I knew of their existence, it always made me happy to keep seeing them crop up - and The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll was the most perfect sendoff these rips could've ever hoped to get.

There's so much to dig into with the rip's quality itself that I don't know where to begin. The rip's opening is front-loaded with such well-done adaptions of iconic Cage sounds, the "Can-can-I get my prescription, PLEASE!!" interlude has stuck with my head ever since I first heard the rip and it only continues from there with Cage sounds being used for just about every part of the original song, the lead, the percussion, the accents, everything. Particularly in this opening section, it slots into my absolute favorite flavor of YTPMV a la The Streamer, where vocal bits from the sources used are audible to a degree where you could reasonably sing along to the song being used. It's all just as much of a delight to hear here, going through the classics of "NOT THE BEES", "A-B-C-D-E-F-K", "Prickly Pear" - yet the rip, as a collab ought to do, escalates into really fun alternate takes on Cageposting, with different visuals, different samples used in different ways, yet all still celebrating the meme's weird yet ever-present legacy on the channel.

Even a year and a half removed from The Legend of Cage's official first and last tribute on SiIvaGunner, I'm still not quite sure where it sits with the fans. The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll, as the most perfect distillation of everything the project ever aimed to be with fantastic visuals to boot, only barely cracked ten thousand views - the original Cagepost that started it all in Season 1 still just below fifty thousand. It was, contrary to the sounds used within the rips themselves, never the loudest meme, nor a very intrusive one, yet it was part of a running gag that was just so fun to see still go on years after its intended legacy passed, with SiIvaGunner's band of YTPMVs teaming up to finish the fight that a bored Season 1 contributed started. Even though it was far from the most popular gag, Grambam36 remembered and absolutely ran with it: and that, to me, is the kind of energy you can only truly get here on SiIvaGunner.

Over the course of this month, I've been having what's best described as an inner battle with myself over which rip from the One Direction takeover of Season 7 to feature, which was really not something I was expecting when the event first began. The timeframe around 9/11 on SiIvaGunner is typically where some of the channel's most subversive and fun events happen, such as the Metal Gear Rising-themed event of Season 4 Episode 2 as described in SUNGORE, or the Not Funny Didn't Laugh day of the Season prior that gave us Sex - Steve Harvey. To just dedicate a day to One Direction instead? To me, it was a little bit of a letdown.

And then, I heard the rips. Oh LORD, the rips.

A lot of my disappointment really came from without giving it a chance, since I lacked much of any connection to One Direction as a band - like Justin Bieber in Babydansen, like Sean Kingston in Crazy Noisy Beautiful Girls and Take You To The Desert, these pop sensations were names I'd probably heard whispers of now and then, but didn't really have any sort of emotional connection to. But over the years, the SiIva rippers have gotten so EXCEPTIONALLY good at twisting my perception of preexisting music completely on its head through their sheer creativity and proficiency - and it was those factors that, after a LOT of rumination, has led me to pick Beautiful Dreamer as the debut rip for One Direction on the blog. To say that it blew me away would be an understatement.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: Lucid Dreamer is a track using the 3/4ths time signature, a far less standard rhythm than the 4/4th time signature that most pop music, What Makes You Beautiful included, uses. This difference in time signatures between songs makes the mashup process far more of a challenge, and overcoming that challenge is thus a sort of accomplishment. Hoopache back in Season 1 garnered quite a bit of attention back in the day for this very reason, and time signature manipulation in general is what makes rips like He4rt4che and 4SGOR3 such fascinating listens. This isn't even to mention how Touhou music in general, and Lucid Dreamer not excluded, has a very distinctly hectic, melodically rapid-fire feel to it - one that ripper minindo has shown excellent understanding of prior with rips like Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source, but now had to take to a whole new level.

With Beautiful Dreamer, minindo came out fucking swinging, and left several of his fellow SiIvaGunner members/contributors in absolute awe in the comments. "i think this rip just created a new genre", says current channel manager MtH, while the team's very own Touhou expert Princess Sylvyspirit of NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2) fame declares it her favorite Touhou rip on the ENTIRE channel. Her own analysis brings up several excellent points I agree with: compared to the days of Hoopache, the adjustment to 3/4ths time done here feels incredibly seamless, with several small manual tweaks to the instrumentation of What Makes You Beautiful that obscure its 4/4ths origin incredibly well. But the most important part Sylvy points out is of course the the highlight of Beautiful Dreamer; the additions minindo made to make the rip truly go above and beyond.

Sure, the rip already bangs as a mashup on its own terms, One Direction's vocals going from a solo to a quintet with the chorus of both songs, as well as becoming pitch-shifted to Lucid Dreamer's melody at the same portion, creates a fantastic sense of buildup and energetic release, a hype that drives the first chorus - but past that chorus, the song suddenly comes to a slower-paced section. A section COMPLETELY new to Beautiful Dreamer, an addition of flavor done by minindo himself. The section is impressive in its own right, but its utilized here as another form of tension buildup for the second chorus, whereupon it practically SOARS back into the song with an added heaviness to the volume and mixing compared to the first chorus.

Hot off the heels of yesterday's celebration, I felt it only right to follow it up with yet more celebration. Wheras SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS was part of a celebration of SiIvaGunner as a whole, today we're looking at a somewhat different celebration: the premiere of Season 6, Bramble Blast Collab, is an enchantingly unique collab even amidst the channel's long history of doing them.

Kickstarted by our good friend tunedlink back in Season 1, collabs like the File Select Fusion Collab were initially labelled as just that - "fusion" collabs, a carryover from the Kirbtunes remix project they were imitating. These proved to be immensely popular and loved by the community, and so the "fusion collab" branding stuck around, eventually morphing into a whole new, more clearly-segmented form of collaborative projects. I'm yet to cover any of these on the blog, but Season 7's Shop Fusion Collab is an excellent example of these collabs - each segment lovingly crafted by teams of rippers with visuals to match. In comparison, the old style of fusion collab may seem a bit messy, a bit unfocused and noisy. But amidst that noise, these have always been able to serve as incredible celebrations of so many parts of SiIvaGunner all at once.

While File Select Fusion Collab served to celebrate the good times had across Season 1, looking back upon all of its events and memes in a sentimental way, Bramble Blast Collab has always felt more...mixed, in its messaging. It has old memes, of course, be it Space Jam, Soulja Boy, or the introductory clip of Chad Warden's holy ghost, but...its filled to the brim with so much more, sources from the channel's recent history like Big Time Rush, Yankin' and Astronaut in the Ocean, amidst sources that are basically never seen on the channel such as Baldi's Basics and Smiling Friends. Its all delivered at a pace that's insanely fast even for the standard of these kinds of collabs - the result is a noise collage not just of SiIvaGunner's history, but of its possible future - the jokes we're yet to hear the full potential of, mixed in with small snippets of our old memories.

Althesame, it carries a slight sense of melancholy to it buried underneath all those funny memes: The track its built on *is* Bramble Blast, after all, one of the most emotionally poignant pieces of retro VGM out there. After rummaging around a zillion sources for most of the rip, the four-minute mark feels as if the song is breaking free of itself with the core melody re-emerging at full force, gradually built up by the increased prominence of the backing melody from the three-minute mark. Season 6, even as early as this, had the feeling of sorrow sort of engrained in it from the announcement of GilvaSunner - the original channel SiIvaGunner is made in tribute of - officially shutting down later that year. The fallout of which wouldn't quite be understood until I've won, but at what cost, but even as far back as the Season's premiere it was as if we were all gearing up for the inevitable.

And so we reach the third installment of this, I guess "Trilogy" of Minindo Touhou rips. It's fascinating, especially as someone who doesn't really know much about the games, to see how Touhou music gradually became more and more prominent on SiIva over the years - it began as mostly just Princess Sylvyspirit's passion project on the channel back in Season 1, yet gradually grew into becoming one of the channel's most known sources for good ass rips. Touhou creator ZUN was featured in both King for a Day Tournaments, we finally got the long-awaited Touhou album right before Season 5 began, and as Season 5's big summer festival event drew to a close, it was a Touhou rip - Reach for the Submission, Immortal Fes - that co-signed its ending.

I've gone on record saying that Season 5 was the time where I was...least engaged in the channel's activity. I believe I described the Season as feeling "aimless" back in my rip :), which in hindsight I wouldn't exactly say is accurate, It's moreso just that it was a period where the channel was doing things I wasn't quite as enthusiastic about. In a way the change was to be expected: the team had put the main narrative of the channel on hold since Season 3 and spent both episodes of Season 4 specifically on building up to, performing, and celebrating the King for Another Day tournament. Season 5 (and the final months of Season 4 Episode 2) was then, in a way, the first time that the channel wasn't really tethered to any recently set-up beats to follow through on, with the Christmas Comeback Crisis already long on hiatus and the King for Another Day tournament officially wrapped up. As a result, we got a ton of interesting, out-there projects that we likely wouldn't have otherwise: The beginning of SiIvaGunner Fusion Records/SGFR in snow halation but it shreds and Running Through Cookie Country, the debut of Friday Night Funkin' and the ridiculously high-effort rips made for it such as Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier; and of course the continued emphasis on voice acted side stories, with various audio dramas such as Curse of the Fallen Angel in Knowledge of the Depths and today's topic, SummerFes 2021.

SummerFes 2021 may not have had as much immediate emotional pathos as its predecessor in Season 4 Episode 2, but used its standalone nature to great effect - a super distinct western theming with some of the best art on the channel, tons of left field events like Christmas in July with Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source and Dream's birthday with Five Dreams at Night 1.16, and so much more. In closing out this vast, varied fun time of rips, Reach for the Submission, Immortal Fes is more than just a meme medley mashup - most all of the jokes are, in chronological order, reflecting each part of this greater SummerFes event. The annual PSY Day, the Spirited Away anniversary event, the Dream event (synced with *Dream* Land's music from Smash 64 to also cover Super Star Symphony), Beatles Day...its a full-on journey, a trip down memory lane of the entire event and just how much fun it all was.