Fame Day: GentleBot Hell

Today is a little different because I’m not pointing to a specific show or YouTube series, but a single video featuring a ridiculous amount of talent. Below is a diagram I created that demonstrates the audience who would most appreciate it:

Now allow me to do what I do and provide a little context.

Futurama is an amazing show [you may have noticed that our Shame Day mascot is the good Dr. Zoidberg] set in the 30th century that is hilarious for one thing, and has the ability to tackle some pretty serious [see: sombre, catastrophically heartbreaking] narrative content to boot. Team Fortress 2 is a free-to-play first person shooter game by Valve; Source Filmmaker is a program by the same company which allows anyone to create videos using assets from their games, TF2 included.

The following is the video Gentlebot Hell, created by YouTube user MisterMulluc:

And here are only a few of the reasons why, if you’re not familiar with either media [and even if you are], that it’s so great:

• MisterMulluc, as he says in the description on YouTube, animated “everything but the particle effects […] from scratch.”
• The spy using the Dead Ringer to fake being killed by the robot “sinning while [he’s] singing.”
• Casting the scout as a member of the Beastie Boys is so obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less incredible.
• Fry is an Engineer robot, and that’s okay, but one-eyed Leela as the turret he’s hefting around is a great touch.
• All of the “indecent magazines” feature GLaDOS on the cover, a character from the Portal games, also by Valve.
• There’s not a part of this video that doesn’t make sense in the context of the song, down to the sound of the spinning wheel in the original video translating to the robot’s spinning head.

In light of that last point, here’s something someone put together which compares the original and the animated video side-by-side:

Now you may be asking why this was worthy of  a Fame Day, besides the fact that it’s undoubtedly pretty cool. After mulling it over, I decided that this wasn’t just a neat lazy route for me to go down, but that this was actually a video that deserved being highlighted.

For one thing, the song is from the ninth Futurama episode ever, titled “Hell Is Other Robots.” The ninth episode of the first season and this is the kind of quality we were getting. It was loads of fun, but also handled the theme of religion by satirizing “logic any Southern Baptist would recognize.” It’s a fantastic entry into a show that went on for many more seasons, and would touch on such topics time and time again. The Robot Devil was also voiced by Dan Castellaneta, AKA Homer on The Simpsons.

On the flipside, this video as a whole is a great example of what talented creators on the internet are able to come up with, an extremely well-made animated video using software that is free to download and use. Not only that, but MisterMulluc makes sure that everything in his video matches up with features in the game [my mention of the Dead Ringer earlier being a prime example]. Absolutely everything fits, and anyone who has played TF2 for a reasonable amount of time will be gleefully catching  one detail after another.

All in all, Gentlebot Hell is a testament to what the internet can produce when referencing and paying homage to an already great work, something we should all certainly be keeping in mind now that Kindle Words is a thing.