MAD Movie

A nihongo|MAD Movie|MADムービー|Maddo Mūbī is a Japanese fan-made video, much like an Anime Music Video. MAD can also describe the Japanese AMV community, although they can be anything from audio clips, edited pictures, to wholly original creations. MADs do not necessarily even need to be related to anime, though the more popular ones typically are. The term MAD (occasionally M@D) is thought to be a reference to the name of one of the original MADs, rather than an particular acronym for anything,

History

Today the word MAD stipulates an edited video or tape made as a parody from doujin circles. However, the true origin of this word comes from the Osaka University of Arts and Music. Around 1978, two members, Mr. Shimagawa and Mr. Y, of the group CAS began making medleys of anime and sentai show songs with guitars. After a while, they decided to try and use their recordings as the actual background music for the shows. After this initial test, they eventually went into the realm of parody. Thus, the MAD was born.

At the same time, in a completely different place in Osaka, a middle school student named Imai had started his own MAD creation. It all began from his desire for the background music from the anime show Yamato. At the time no drama records had been released, so he recorded the BGM from the TV show where there was no dialogue and pieced the clips together to make a full song. After enjoying success in this first endeavor, he began to piece together dialogue from the show and create his own memorable scenes for the show. Upon sharing his works with his Yamato loving friends and having fun playing with words and quotes, they decided to actually edit the video as well. This ultimately led to the creation of the MAD Yamato club in their high school years. Finally, when Imai entered the Osaka University of Arts and Music, the fate of these MADs were brought together. Imai, excited that there were others interested in such zany acts, took in the Sound MAD created by his senpai and released his NEW MAD SERIES.

Types of MAD Movies

MAD Movies can be divided into a number of subcategories. MADs are also not limited to a single category, but can be a member of multiple categories.

Anime MAD (アニメMAD, also known as MADアニメ MAD Anime or 動画MAD Dōga MAD)

Perhaps the most common type of MADs, these are roughly the equivalent of Anime Music Videos. It is basically anime footage edited to some music. Some use elaborate video techniques resembling opening video themes of professional anime.

till Picture MAD (静止画MAD Seishiga MAD)

These MADs use images as the video source. The images are often taken from visual novels or eroge, and they usually contain extensive animation and effects work in order to create a video from the images

Unison MAD

These MADs take the opening sequence from an anime and recreate it using a different video and audio source, often for humorous sync value.

Neta MAD (ネタMAD)

These MADs usually contain a quick joke. They are often 15 or 30 seconds in length.

Differences between MADs and Anime Music Videos

An Anime music video (AMV) is typically defined as a fan-made video using Japanese animation, set to an audio source (typically a song). That same definition applies to many MADs. As stated earlier though, MADs consist of much more than this. There are audio and image MADs, and even MADs that are unrelated to anime.

The main difference between AMVs and MADs though, is the fact that MADs are more like parodies. Instead of clips from anime series, MAD videos use similar effects found in opening or ending sequences of anime. Those effects tend to be synchronized with the music. Furthermore, MADs do not necessarily have to be anime related, where as AMVs are implied to require anime.

Currently, MADs have been originating from Japanese sources. The MAD community designates itself to be in Japanese exclusive only. This may implies that anime based music video of non-Japanese origin are deemed as non-MADs. This of course varies since some people also categorise them as MADs as long as they are in Japanese language.

MAD Database

A very large MAD database is available from http://cojack.hp.infoseek.co.jp/ It was last updated on 2007/03/02, so it does not contain recent MADs. The database is a .csv file which can be loaded into a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc. It contains listings for thousands of different MADs, so it can be an excellent resource. That page also contains a program called Halahala that can search through the database, but it is in Japanese and can be rather difficult to use.

See also

* Anime Music Video

References

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20050212172315/http://web.ics.purdue.edu/%7Emilliken/anime/mad.html The Outlaw's MAD Info Page]

External links

* [http://www.madmovie.org/info.html MadMovie.org The Society for Study of Modern MAD Culture]