#thingybobinc

Whew!! MAGFest days are finally over, and what a time it was - the SiIvaGunner Chipspace show was absolutely fantastic, and I hope it gets uploaded on its own soon so y'all can watch it as well! With that out of the way: the sappy times are over, Season 8 is ready to rev up and go at any moment, and the blog must go on. So, given that I spent all of yesterday talking about the Nostalgia Critic takeover with Fragile Snowman (Remastered), I figured it'd be fitting to return to the Season that said nostalgia was directed to - and an all-time favorite memory I have of watching the channel at that time.

I've pointed it out a good number of times by now, including once again in yesterday's post, but one of the things that really did make Season 1 so unique was how spontaneous and unpredictable it felt. The main reason was of course that we lacked much of any expectations in general, but the channel back in Season 1 also didn't exactly have much in the way of large-scale projects planned ahead like the Christmas Comeback Crisis, or the various Festival events that debuted in Season 4 Episode 2 onward. If you caught the SiIvaGunner panel at MAGFest this year, or have followed anything regarding rips like the Shop Fusion Collab or projects like CCC Episode 11, you'll know just how large and coordinated these projects have become. As Chaze explained back in MAGFest 2019: SiIvaGunner Presents - High Quality Ripping, meanwhile, back in Season 1 they would occasionally just completely abandon whatever event they seemed to be teasing just to fuck with the audience and subvert their expectations.

Subverting our expectations was the initial pitch for the SiIvaGunner channel as a whole, but by the time Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl was uploaded halfway through Season 1, it really did feel like we'd gotten better at seeing through the smoke and mirrors - we knew that all rips would show their cards eventually and then cue for laughter from us as viewers. Keep in mind: this was also just a week shy from the start of The Reboot, at at time when the idea of the channel having lore or that it would progress much further, was really just conspiracy talk. And indeed, Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl shows its hand quite early - just 10 seconds into the rip, as the song properly "begins", it becomes a pretty pretty standard, though befitting mashup, one you'd probably expect from just seeing the title. Joke revealed, cue laughter, add to playlist...

Then suddenly, the rip stops - and the facade is lifted. And I suppose it's time for me to start lifting the facade here too, perhaps?

Indeed, if you saw the title of today's post, opened the YouTube link in a new tab, and kept reading the post, you may have felt like you knew exactly what you'd be getting - a solid Season 1-era mashup of Be Cool, Be Wild and Be Groovy and the 2000s rock hit Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet. Yet before the mashup is able to go anywhere, the joke is interrupted, mockingly so, by Dr. Eggman, sentence-mixed to poke fun at you over thinking you'd gotten the joke of the rip down. This is no longer a bait-and-switch, but a DOUBLE bait-and-switch - presenting you with the switch for long enough to make you comfortable, then pulling the rug under THAT immediately. And, like - I don't think I can overstate how absolutely baffling that was to experience back in 2016?? Though SiIvaGunner was indeed about subverting expectation, six months in it had still built itself an identity of what to expect from the channel - yet without any warning, here it felt as if the team was practically doing a prank on its own fans. Better yet, the prank only escalated from there, as Eggman voice clips are interspersed in the beats inbetween the song's vocals, before he's suddenly joined by voice clips from Big the Cat of all characters - this prank is on three levels of rug-pulling.

And indeed, I've kind of pulled a prank on you here as well - because the post you're reading is actually about TWO rips from Season 1. Earlier in the third paragraph, I was describing the first of these rips, the one linked in the Bandcamp embed here - uploaded two weeks before the events of The Reboot kicked into motion. Because of that, it plays on the mixed feelings the fanbase once had on using Snow Halation in rips, only to switch it with Are You Gonna Be My Girl: hence the name, Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl. As The Reboot came and went, however, and told its story specifically about how Snow Halation truly deserves its place on the channel, we'd see the upload of a second rip a few weeks later - pulling the inverse joke. It's possible, back then, that enough time had passed between the two rips to where people had forgotten about the original bait-and-switch, but what was once used as a way to make fun of Snow Halation's percieved mediocrity was now spun into an actual appreciation and celebration of the song!

I hope all of this information on the history of these two moderately-known 2016 rips in particular is at all comprehensible, but the point I wanted to convey is - this shit was REALLY cool to see happen live with both videos. With Be Cool, Be Wild and Be My Girl, it felt like one of the first big shake-ups to the channel's status quo we'd yet seen at that point, and sort of prepared us to never take anything in a rip at face value - then, with the second rip, it felt like a perfect testament to how much The Reboot truly had changed the perception on Snow Halation as a song. The switch to the song didn't feel like an annoyance, but like a rip we'd all now suddenly actually wanted to see - one that we welcomed with open arms. Be it due to rippers being inspired or just paying tribute to one another, these kinds of call-and-response rips are a lot more common on the channel than you may initially think, and are sometimes even made years apart. Be it Windows Wonga Wappa, Ripping Video Game Music​.​.​.​.​.​.​At Night (2020 Edition), or even just with remasters like Violet Snow Memories, it never stops being heartwarming to see rippers pay tribute to one another - or just continuing on from a joke they themselves started.