Sopranos Mashup on YouTube

Virginia Heffernan, the TV critic for THE NEW YORK TIMES, has an interesting piece in today's paper about the video, "Seven Minute Sopranos," which you can view below. The video, as you can imagine from the title, reviews the entire set of episodes in seven minutes using video clips from the shows and a voice-over narration by the creators (Paul Gulyas and Joe Sabia). Heffernan reports that, unlike Viacom, the people at HBO, and the show's creator, David Chase, seem delighted with the video and the free publicity it provides for the new season, starting Sunday. No copyright problems here. Heffernan provides background on how the video was produced and devleops a nice technical/critical analysis of the video. She insists it isn't "sycophantic." "The more you study 'Seven Minute Sopranos,' the more mischievous it seems. It’s an intensive work of the imagination." Where David Chase seems to be taking the video as a kind of homage, Heffernan suggests it may in fact be a critical send-up of the show. In this sense the video may be functioning much like Henry Jenkins insists fan fiction functions, as a form of "critical commentary" on the original.