Wednesday, February 18, 2009

This is all different kinds of wrong

by Chris MaGee

Okay, my YouTube searches take me down some strange detours at times, but they've rarely been as strange as this. Here is a clip from what's probably the most surreal and disturbing exercise video that I think I've ever seen, and that counts Richard Simmon's "Sweating to the Oldies". Please bear witness to the insanity that is "Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video for Being Appraised as an 'Ex-fat Girl'". Poodles aerobacizing on their hind legs? A woman with "poodle" muscles? Roseanne Roseanna Danna hair and bad dubbing? What the hell is this!

It turns out that the woman, Mariko Takahashi, is a Japanese rhythmic gymnastics champ who competed at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, and the video, directed by commercial filmmaker Nai Noda, is among nine others featured in a collection put out by Panasonic to coincide with the games titled "Ten Short Movies: Capture the Motion". Okay... but that doesn't explain the... well, the everything in this. I like weird things, but this is like a bad acid trip.

Apparently this has been circulating around online for a long while now, but it's the first I've seen of it. I pass the weirdness onto our loyal readers.

3 comments:

Bob Turnbull said...

You labeled this as "Just For Fun"? Are you mad!?

Dammit that's gonna take awhile to shake off...

Unknown said...

Nagi Noda was an amazing artist who passed away in '08. You should look into the rest of her work.

Ri said...

....
....
....
Well.
That just makes me NOT want to work out. No to poodle arms! :P

Thanks for sharing though!