Setting aside the fact that loudly “debuting” a “viral video” is antithetical to the definition of a viral video, the new viral video for the upcoming Ridley Scott-helmed Prometheus debuted today, and it’s pretty great. Not coincidentally, it also prominently features the often-great Michael Fassbender as “David,” a next-generation android from the Weyland Corporation that can improve efficiency and “blend in with your workforce effortlessly.” (Ah, to work at an office where Michael Fassbender “blends in”…) Oh, and he can also carry out tasks humans might find “distressing, or unethical,” and apparently possesses both self-awareness and the ability to process emotion, which will probably have little to no effect on the crew of Prometheus when the film hits theaters on June 8.

In case you missed it, here’s the first Prometheus “viral video,” which debuted in February and features Guy Pearce as David’s presumed daddy, Peter Weyland, giving a TED talk from the year 2023.

It’s been a long, gray five weeks since the last new episode of Parks And Recreation aired, time I’ve spent sadly tapping my Ron Swanson bobblehead as a single tear rolls down my cheek. Little did I know, if only I were a rugged woodsman in the Ron Swanson/Nick Offerman vein, I could have filled that time lathing and whittling my own bobble-Swanson, a task that surely would have kept me busy well into the show’s seventh season. Alas, I bought mine from the NBC store like the soft-handed urbanite I am—but only because I didn’t have the man himself to show me how to do it. Now, thanks to NBC—which surely has no ulterior motive in posting such a video—we have step-by-step instructions on creating our own mustachioed bobblehead. (Most important step: Don’t forget the nasal-labial fold.) So grab your special woodcutting pants and ridiculously oversized hunk of wood and get started now, so that you have a new, vaguely octagonal friend to watch Thursday’s new Parks And Rec with.

For those of you who need extra hand-holding, here’s a bonus video on how to saw a log ...

Edgar Wright, director of Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, has teamed with illustrator Tommy Lee Edwards and a little guy known as Microsoft to bring the world The Random Adventures Of Brandon Generator. It's an animated web comic of sorts that tells the story of a guy with severe writer's block, who drinks a lot of coffee and suddenly has a bunch of ideas. Thrilling, I know. (Oh, and it's narrated by a guy from The Mighty Boosh.) There are going to be four episodes total, and the first one just sets up the basics; it's interesting enough, sort of a melancholy look at the life of an isolated and tortured writer. The cool part is going to come later on, because once you finish watching the seven-minute intro, you get to submit some of your own prose—and if it's good enough, it'll be included in future episodes. So promises Wright in an interview he did for Wired, so you know it's for real. Also, you can explore Brandon's room inside the interactive game, and do things like sketch with his pen. Someone call ...

When he hasn’t been reveling in the wondrous (intelligent) design of the banana or throwing himself some righteous birthday parties, Kirk Cameron has been busy hunting for lost American values and pissing off old co-workers with his anti-gay pontificating. In addition to his Growing Pains family being none-too-pleased about his words, a Voltron of fellow child actors from Cameron’s heyday have recorded their own response to his antics. CCOKC, or Child Celebrities Opposing Kirk Cameron, features the likes of Brice Beckham (Mr. Belvedere), Christine Lakin (Step By Step), and Jeremy Licht (The Hogan Family) coming together to poke a bunch of holes in Cameron’s theories and to just distance themselves from his “horseshit” in general. It's a fun video, but it's a bummer that Tiffany Brissette from Small Wonder wasn't available.

This charming little commercial the Tokyo Disney Resort started airing about a month ago and has begun to get some traction among anime aficionados on the Internet. As Twitch columnist Hugo Ozman explains, it encapsulates “the life story of a little girl in 40 seconds,” with a special emphasis on how all the happiest moments at the various stages of her existence have some connection to the place that Walt built. (Apparently the Disney-loving character is named Yumeno Maihama and shares a birthday with Mickey Mouse.) Check it out and bask in the latest proof, as if any were needed, that the best way to recapture the innocent, imaginative spirit of early Disney is to call some guys in Japan. 

In the kind of video that might actually appeal to the eternally cranky David Simon, Erlend Lavik has created an in-depth analysis of The Wire’s visual style and techniques called “Style In The Wire.” And by in-depth, we mean “36 minutes of pretty brilliant comparison and analysis.” For instance, Lavik, who is an Assistant professor in the Department of information science and media studies at Norway’s University of Bergen, points out that the music in The Wire occurs organically and that any music is also heard by characters and not used as audience cues. Lavik also goes into detail about techniques like the use of 4-by-3 aspect ratio, the influence of documentaries on the show’s style, the use of rearview mirror shots, and how the show actually trusted the audience's intelligence in avoiding obvious visual cues. It’s an absolutely fascinating breakdown of the show that seems to transcend all those surface arguments Simon has railed against. Yes, it’s long, but for fans of the show, it’s worth watching (and still shorter than an episode of The Cape). [via Buzzfeed]

Have you heard? Boy bands are back! The recent resurgence has made some of us yearn for the last wave of pop quintets, who at least had the decency to dance to their prefab-pop earworms. This inexplicable (read: Japanese) video doubles down on the millennial nostalgia by combining one of said earworms, Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” with awkwardly dancing, poorly CGI-ed figures from the Fellowship Of The Ring movie, who have BSB’s weird hand-flapping dance routine down pretty well despite the fact that Frodo appears to not have legs. Keep an eye on the background for a glimpse of Samwise, who is clearly the Howie D. of the Fellowship. [h/t The Mary Sue]

From the people who brought the world (aka the Internet, aka "the real world") the Doug live-action movie trailer comes this one for the later Nickelodeon cartoon Hey Arnold!, by sketch group Drcoolsex. And it's just as eye-opening about the original series as the Doug trailer was. Hey Arnold! was about a kid with a football-shaped head to went to public school and got beat up by the neighborhood bully Helga. Now he's all grown up, and Helga seems to have turned over a new leaf and is, actually, pretty sweet and cute. Plus secretly psychotic. And if you grew up with these Nickelodeon shows, let this be a lesson that it could happen to you. To youuuuuuuuuuuu!

In case you haven't heard, auteur Michael Bay is going to be rebooting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles except they will no longer be either teenage or mutants. Rather, they will be alien ninja turtles intent on sodomizing your childhood. Not that it matters because, as Bay should know by now, you can never make everyone happy all of the time anyway so just give them a lot of shit blowing up and they'll be fine. Shiny things! These new alien mutant turtles will also be edgy which now means that rapping is out and metal is totes in, right? So here's a metal take on the old Turtles theme song which sounds tailor-made for jump-cuts every three seconds punctuated by explosions out of every corner of the screen. You're welcome, auteur Michael Bay. 

Sure, mashing a random song with a Jay-Z song is old hat, going back to the early aughts when Danger Mouse paired his Black Album with The Beatles' White Album. Then more people mashed-up Jay-Z (like with Weezer's Blue Album and that collaboration with Linkin Park) that resulted with Jay-Z offering up a version of the Black Album custom-tailored for mash-ups. So, yes, mash-ups. But that doesn't mean the Internet isn't capable of still churning out worthy clips, such as the below mash-up which pairs Jay-Z's “Hola' Hovito,” from his acclaimed album The Blueprint, with “Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)” by acoustic funny duo Flight of the Conchords. The end result is pretty great, funny slow jam with dueling attempts to woo ladies that makes for a good track to ease into the weekend.

Here at The A.V. Club, we love things that are stylish. Like Hitchcock! And we are also aware that, yes, there were forms of entertainment before Community, Mad Men, Parks & Rec, and Breaking Bad came along. Like Hitchcock! So enjoy the below video, a unique, stylish timelapse of all the shenanigans Jimmy Stewart peeps out his window in the Hitchcock classic Rear Window. Put together by Jeff Desom, the clip is actually a “making of” featurette Desom made to show the creation of a visual installation that loops all the footage. Said Desom of his handiwork:

I dissected all of Hitchcock's Rear Window and stiched it back together in After Effects. I stabilized all the shots with camera movement in them. Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions. The order of events stays true to the movie's plot.

Desom also outlines the techniques and software he used to stitch it all together at his site for people who are in to that sort of thing.

There's been a bevy of Mad Men stuff in this section recently thanks to the show's long-awaited return to the small screen, but it's time for a break, to go back to the building blocks of viral videos: movie mash-ups and cats. Internet funny person Jeff Wysaski (a.k.a. Pleated Jeans) put together this video mashing up famous movie scenes with popular video clips featuring cats, and it streams together pretty well. One's enjoyment will likely rest on one's enjoyment of cats, and if one doesn't like cats to begin with, well, there's likely no helping you anyway. Praise be to Maru.

Paul Scheer, of The League and NTSF:SD:SUV:: fame, is a notable super-fan of television. He attended a Lost panel a few years ago to present Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse with a velvet painting he did depicting the two of them with a polar bear. So you know he's legit. Now he's getting excited during Breaking Bad's off-season by promising to create gif-upon-gif-upon-gif. "Walter White as Nyan Cat!…Jesse Pinkman doing the 'Haters gonna hate' strut!" Scheer promises in the opening video for breakinggifs.com (which he pronounces as "breaking jifs"). The site's pretty slim so far, but knowing Scheer isn't one to skimp on his promises, expect plenty of updates. Here's his welcome video in its entirety:

Paul Scheer announces Breakinggifs.com from Gif Breaking on Vimeo.

People really like making videos of The Simpsons. But unlike, say, a 48-minute video of every Itchy & Scratchy appearance, some don't make a whole lot of sense. Case in point: this video showing the first three minutes and 20 seconds of 130 different Simpsons episodes played simultaneously. There's no sound because, of course, that would be a loud buzz like bees descending on a ginormous mound of sugar. Still, there's something eerily hypnotic about watching them all unspool at the same time. Like an Orwellian nightmare, viewed just before hopping on board the Spruce Moose. Check it out below and keep in mind the video is best viewed when embiggened. [via The Aggregate]

Turns out, videogames have not only been encouraging the sedentary lifestyle since their invention, but for a period in the ’80s and early ’90s, they actively encouraged you to eat really crappy food. Patrick Scott Patterson, a “videogame historian” (HOW DO YOU GET THAT JOB?!), has put together more than eight minutes of video proof that games + junk food = cash money in the bank. Most of his “evidence” involves an odd Lottery-style game people played back in the day, where they scratched off tickets for the chance to win an Atari. Now, I know I’m supposed to ironically laugh at the concept now, but seriously, I would play a hundred Lotteries for the chance to play such gems as Flag Capture or Star Raiders for the seven seconds it takes for me to get sick of them. Then, I’ll get a Big Mac.

[Kotaku]

Anyone with time on their hands and a passion for inside jokes will love the new Mad Men 8-bit game that's hit YouTube. It has a catchy soundtrack, nifty graphics, and is Choose Your Own Adventure-style, so viewers can meander through the smoky, alcohol-soaked world of Sterling Cooper Draper Price, asking appropriate questions like "Who's Megan?" and "Why have three different actors played Bobby Draper?" There are three different outcomes to the game, so it can literally suck up tens of minutes of a player’s time, which should come in handy for anyone clockwatching until Mad Men's season premiere this Sunday night.

[h/t Buzzfeed]

Supercuts are old and busted; splice cuts are all the rage now. Witness that Jay-Z video from a few weeks ago and yesterday’s Eminem/Mitt Romney combo. Now comes an example that uses the women of Mad Men to recite The Supremes’ classic “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” But, like that Romney clip, there’s more to the video than just showing off whiz-bang tech skills. Elisa Kresinger created the video with help from mash-up guru Marc Faletti and posted it to her website, Pop Culture Pirate, where she added this bit of social context to the video. 

By framing the female characters from Mad Men in a series of boxes, we wanted to illustrate how the show, and by extension, society, isolates and marginalizes womens’ voices within pop-culture narratives. As a result, it’s important for women to tell their own stories. For me as a remix artist,  making mash ups is the best way to tell these stories. I call it writing with TV for TV.

And how about a bonus video? Kresinger also used Mad Men to explore another social theme—homosexuality—via a supercut that creates a slash-fic writer’s dream romance between Roger Sterling ...

With the anticipation for Friday’s opening of The Hunger Games reaching a fever pitch, it isn’t surprising that YouTube has been overrun with parodies of the popular series. What is a surprise is that a few of these have actually turned out to be pretty funny, including a pretty spot-on spot for Coke that ends in a violent twist and a bizarre Hamburger Helper spot in which the talking Helper glove becomes even creepier than usual. Hamburger Helper and Coke: Sounds like a good meal if you're from District 12, am I right?

 Fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race—and there are only two types of people in this world, fans of Drag Race and people who haven’t seen Drag Race—were shocked last night at the (spoiler alert) surprise elimination of label-whore/shade-thrower-in-chief Willam Belli for mysterious reasons. RuPaul dressed down Belli for “breaking the rules of the competition,” a maddeningly vague justification that has the Internet buzzing today. (Drugs? Hormone therapy? Confidentiality breach?) Of course, given Drag Race’s propensity for appropriating and blowing up reality-show tropes, there’s also the distinct possibility that Willam—who was a semi-successful actor before joining the program—and the producers conspired to create a false controversy that would bring both the show and Belli a little extra attention. Strengthening this suspicion is the oh-so-timely appearance of a new music video from Belli and two other queens titled “Chow Down (At Chick-Fil-A),” an ode to the hate-mongering-yet-delicious fried-chicken-shack. Belli’s justification for the song—which spoofs both Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” and TLC’s “Waterfalls”—was that, after getting diarrhea from the fast-food chain, she figured, “The worst endorsement for a Christian chicken eatery is three drag queens. So it’s like, ‘Alright ...

As a young man, I enjoyed the angry music of Ministry, the industrial band that started life as a wimpy synth-pop band in Chicago in the early '80s. My first "alternative" show (back when people still used that word) was Ministry at the Avalon Theater in Milwaukee on the Land Of Rape And Honey tour. It was scary. The band broke through in the early '90s with Psalm 69 and its political-leaning single "N.W.O.," whose pastiche video was also a bit frightening. Frontman (and sole original member) Al Jourgensen ended the band a few years ago, but recently reignited it for an album that's due out next week, Relapse. I happened upon the video, and it made me a little sad because it's... Well, you'll see. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe you'll like it. Bad job, Internet!

Congratulations Miike Snow scavenger hunters, your search is over!

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There's really not a whole lot to say about this one other than that it’s awesome, awe-inspiring, and surely its creator deserves some sort of Internet Medal of Honor. Someone apparently leafed through all 500-plus episodes of The Simpsons and put together this 48-minute supercut of what’s purported to be every single Itchy & Scratchy clip on the show. It's a violent, fun, heady (and headless) visual trip through 20-plus years of animated cat-on-mouse violence that Tom & Jerry could never live up to, even when they had that bulldog in their cartoon, and everyone knows adding a dog is stupid. (Rather than cross-checking the accuracy of that claim, it's probably better to just go ahead and watch now as, somewhere, FOX lawyers are sharpening their cease-and-desist blades.) [via BWE]

Politics and music usually go together like peanut butter and ham. Witness the pairing of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Kid Rock, who endorsed Romney in their shared home state of Michigan (or the maybe-maybe-not union of Rick Santorum and Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine). But sometimes, politics and music can be united in a beautiful, court-approved marriage that results in magic. Like President Obama singing Al Green, or, in this case, Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” being used to highlight the elusive views of Mitt Romney. Reminiscent of the Jay-Z splice a few weeks ago, Australian Hugh Atkin splices together choice words of various speakers—but mostly Romney—to create a delightful portrait and deconstruction of a political candidate, all set to a memorable hook. There are plenty of inspired moments, including the use of Obama for the chorus, but the moment at 1:30 is probably the highlight of the clip. [via Buzzfeed]

We, the citizens of the Internet, are forever grateful for people with far too much time on their hands and a penchant for pure nerdiness. That's why things like this way, way overthought map of Panem, the mythical future word that's the setting for The Hunger Games, exist.

Two Livejournal users, Badguys and AimMyArrowsHigh, took into consideration the fact that "destruction of the modern structure and the rise of Panem was caused by a cataclysmic natural disaster" and varying speculations about sinkshelves and whether the Mississippi River was "the dam that broke in the 70th Games" and came up with a kind of enchanting, swirly map of what Panem might look like map-wise, were it in fact not completely fictional.

The entire explanation of the map's orientation and designations is worth a read, because it kind of makes total sense, despite the fact that it's absolutely bonkers. If nothing else, Hunger Games fans can figure out what district they're in and then grouse about how they'd rather not be stuck doing a lifetime raising livestock. [via Vulture]

If you’re on Twitter you’ve probably read a tweet from @Horse_ebooks and been amused, enchanted, confused, or some combination of the three emotions by what you read. To appreciate @horse_ebooks, it helps to understand its ostensible mission—to sell ebooks about horses—its apparent actual mission—to promote links to spammy sites promoting weight-loss plans and the usual Internet commercial flotsam—and the degree to which it falls short of both by tweeting accidentally poetic literary snippets along the lines of “(Do) you remember me? (Do) you think of him (any)? He-brought them with-him. We-remember them too. We-used-to-think of them. Did- you —bring” and “Read the results, not the infinite.” Back in January, Splitsider did an in-depth analysis of the feed that mentioned a few @horse_ebooks-inspired spinoffs like a fan fiction site and Horse_ecomics. The piece provided almost too much to check out, but a recent spotlight on Horse_ecomics on Comics Alliance served as a reminder that the project, by graphic designer Burton Durand deserves closer attention, spinning cryptic phrases like “Check out some of these moves” and “HOLY COW!!... DOG TOYS ARE GETTING EXPENSIVE” into inspired flights of fancy, and proof that even the refuse of the ...

As a general rule of thumb, we avoid videos involving puppies here at Great Job, Internet so as not to get lost in the glut of the gajillions of other cute-animal-related videos that circulate the Internet on an hourly basis. However, this rule has occasionally been broken if the video seemed worthwhile, and the below video is just such a case. It’s a recreation of the wampa scene from The Empire Strikes Back featuring the film’s original audio but using action figures instead of actors, and a pug (Chubbs the Pug, to be precise) in a wampa costume rather than an actual wampa. It’s enough to melt even the coldest nerd hearts, though this recreation has a surprising twist ending that differs from the original film—but we’ve already learned when spoilers aren’t appropriate, so we’ll just leave this right here. [via The Aggregate]

If you’ve been reading The A.V. Club for a while, you’re probably aware that we have a troubled relationship with spoilers… and with the return of spoiler-prone shows like Game Of Thrones and Mad Men on the horizon, the discussion probably isn’t going to abate any time soon. Or maybe it will now, thanks to this College Humor sketch that lays down some much-needed ground rules for navigating spoilers, with the help of human spoilers Bubbles (Andre Royo), Hiro (Masi Oka), Samuel T. Anders (Michael Trucco), Rita (Julie Benz), and other much-loved/-contested characters. It’s funny, sure, but it’s also pretty sage advice for both would-be spoilers and spoilees. Heed, ye denizens of Internet message boards, and live a happier, spoiler-free life! 

While science has determined what it thinks is Ice Cube’s “good day” (though Cube himself has disputed science’s findings), last Friday marked a sad day for hip-hop: the 15th anniversary of the untimely death of rapper Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. While many were content with a simple, “Miss you, Biggie,” others found more … unique ways to honor the fallen rapper. For instance, the AARP—yes, that AARP—honored Biggie on its Twitter feed which led to an amusing hashtag that produced predictable though fun results. But nothing can top DJ/mixtape auteur Terry Urban’s tribute: a mash-up of Biggie’s Ready To Die and Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die, two musical tastes that go together like peanut butter and gasoline. It’s hard to think that anything could improve on the hip-hop classic and while this mash-up doesn’t, it’s still a fun project and, if anything, proves Biggie’s music remains as relevant and hard-hitting today as it was 15 years ago when the rapper was murdered. And it makes Born To Die listenable so, yay. Check it out below.

Have you heard? New episodes of Community are back starting next Thursday, March 15! (If you haven’t heard/don’t care, please turn in your A.V. Club badge and we’ll give you a 15 second head start before we commence chasing you with pitchforks.) Once the little show that could returns to the air, the Internet will surely stop talking about and obsessing over it, because that’s how these things work, right? Well, that leaves us eight days to soak up all the fan trailers, mash-ups, animated gifs, and supplementary Community material the web has to offer, so here are a few that are making the rounds today. Something something streets ahead.

First, a trailer mash-up of Community with another little-watched, cultishly adored comedy. Frankly, Internet, I’m disappointed it took you so long to get around to this.

This one makes less sense, but hey, Prometheus is almost as anticipated as the return of Community, and besides, those clips from “Basic Rocket Science” and “Epidemiology” had to be put to good use somehow, right?

And finally, if original, non-mash-up content is more your thing, well, the Internet is probably not the first place you should ...

First, the bros took jobs away from honest, hard-working Americans, filling the lower ranks of law firms and sales departments everywhere. Then they started renting apartments in nice neighborhoods, cramming too many people into one small apartment and bringing down property values with empty kegs, broken Ping Pong tables, and ragged couches strewn across lawns. And then the bros wreaked havoc with health-insurance premiums, sending costs skyrocketing because of hospital visits due to company softball games, bar fights, and alcohol poisoning from over-indulgence at Entourage viewing parties. So it was only a matter of time before pop culture gave in, tailoring itself to meet the needs of this wave of bros. Mike Lachner, a.k.a. Wonder-Tonic, has prepped a parody of Kerouac’s On The Road—titled On The Bro’d—and now has moved on to movie translations, providing subtitles of classic movies for bros so that they, too, may enjoy some cinematic classics. No word if Lachner also intends to support President Obama’s bro amnesty program, aimed at forgiving loans bros rack up purchasing retro basketball jerseys to wear to summer music festivals. [via The Daily What]

As we saw from this Saturday’s “Real Housewives Of Disney” sketch on SNL, there are few pop-culture entities that can’t be Disney-fied and consequently made 100 times more disturbing. (Or, as we saw from last night’s Simpsons couch gag, that can’t be Game Of Thrones-ified and made 100 times more awesome.) That pattern extends to this Game Of Thrones recut trailer featuring an assortment of familiar Disney faces standing in for the Starks, Lannisters, et al. It’s not quite a shot-for-shot remake of the original season-two trailer, titled “You Win Or You Die,” but the Disney-to-Westeros substitutions are pretty apt: Robin Hood’s Prince John as Joffrey, Mulan as Arya, and, inevitably, Grumpy as Tyrion. Though the fact that Daenerys becomes Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent speaks to the dearth of badass Disney princesses/dragon owners. But hey, at least she’s not Pete from Pete’s Dragon.  

And here’s the original for comparison:

Season 2: Preview - You Win or You Die