Yesterday I rediscovered the JibJab website. If you're not familiar with JibJab (www.jibjab.com) it's a website that allows you to put friends, family, famous people, or yourself into videos - usually silly dance videos set to famous songs. For example, you can replace Psy's face with your Mom's in the Gangnam Style video, you can place your boss's head on Katy Perry's body in the video for California Gurls, or you can relive the 70s or 80s by starring in a Soul Train or Jazzercise video, just like Olivia Newton John.
How it usually works is that you upload a picture of yourself or someone else. You then use the easy editing tool to crop the face and animate the mouth. Finally you cast your video. It's that easy.
I have two nephews in grade school (4th and 6th grade) and my sister was nice enough to give me new school pictures of them on Thanksgiving. Thanks to modern technology I was able to upload their pictures and create a holiday JibJab (well, 12 to be exact. After all, how better to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas than to watch a new silly video each day for 12 days.).
In making the first video, two mariachis dancing to Feliz Navidad, I learned that the creators of JibJab and my nephews share a dance style. That style can best be described as awkwardly awesome. After pondering the coincidence I began to suspect that there might be a gene connected to this style of dance. Call it the Dancing Fools gene, I hypothesize that it is responsible for the creation of a wealth of dorky dances including the Running Man, the Sprinkler, the Robot, the Pop N Loc, the Worm...(I could go on and on). In fact, I would guess that this likely double-recessive gene could be found in the DNA make-up of such individuals as Psy, MC Hammer, everyone involved in the Super Bowl Shuffle, and my nephews.
While most people would just laugh at the ridiculousness of the JibJab videos, my nephews watched the first one over and over to try to perfect the super dorky moves. I would guess that Vanilla Ice and Weird Al would likely do the same. And come the end of the 12 days of JibJab videos for Christmas, they should have quite the repertoire of awesomely goofy moves.
Keep dancing, boys. Keep dancing!
