The Mighty Boosh is so surreal when you first watch it. The main characters consist of two zookeepers- Howard Moon and Vince Noir, the zoo owner – Bob Fossil, one shaman and then potentially the scariest is a gorrilla. There are many other minor characters who are played by Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett, which actually could be considered as postmodern, as a form of bricolage, but also because some of the characters played are a direct reference to other people, both fictional and real. For example, the Spirit of the Jazz could be seen as a representation of Slash from Guns and Roses and also Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen. This is not only intertextual, but it also draws attention to the fact that we live in a culture which is obsessed with celebrities (Slash from Guns and Roses).
At the beginning of the first series Vince and Howard begin the show by giving a direct address to the audience about what is to come in the show. This is self-reflexive as it draws attention to the fact that the programme is merely a construction for the public’s entertainment. This also goes against ‘The breakdown of the distinction between culture and society’ (one of Strinati’s five ways to define postmodernism). This point from Strinati says that ‘art once attempted to reflect reality. Postmodern reality now incorporates art in the form of media texts and today we make sense of reality with reference to media texts.’ These references also show what is considered to be ‘high art’, the theatre, with the curtains behind them.
The use of bricolage throughout allows the show to refernce many different genres. These vary from music videos (the tundra rap),
to fantasy (‘welcome to mirror world’) and romantic comedy. Cartoons were also used in later series. This mixing of genres is generally postmodern, however, it is not bricolage as other texts do it, as all of the footage is newly shot. In fact, The Mighty Boosh does tend to blur the boundaries between different genres rather than use bricolage in the traditional sense. The Mighty Boosh can be classed as a comedy, musical, fantasy, science fiction and many more.
This show also parodies and satirises many other shows, as well as genres in general. The episode ‘Mutants’ is a parody of the horror/sci-fi genre, and a more precise parody is my personal favourite episode, ‘The Nightmare of Milky Joe’, which is a parody of the film ‘Castaway’, starring Tom Hanks. Obvious parallels can be drawn between the two texts, with Tom Hanks’ character creating an imaginary friend out of a football, and in The Mighty Boosh, Howard creates Milky Joe from a coconut. However, the Mighty Boosh takes the idea one step further into the surreal, with the coconut people coming alive to capture Howard and Vince.
1. Julian McDougall (2009) L3 - (difficult to define not impossible, has specific audiences and can still be clear groups such as 'chavs' and 'emos')
2. McQuail (1992) L2 - (changing niche, own specific niche)
3. Ien Ang (1991) L4 - (more sub categories)
4. John Hartley (1987) L3 - (understanding your audience)
5. Hypodermic theory L2/3 - (inject ideas into audiences heads)
6. Pluralist (active) theory L2/3 - (own interpretation)
7. Users & gratifications theory L2 - (escapsim, relationship and surveillance)
Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life
Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains
10 marks - explanation/analysis/argument
(answering the questions and showing how you've progressed)
10 marks - examples
(from research and own texts AS and A2)
5 marks - terminology
(media terms)
During the beggining of contructing my AS coursework I didn't have much if anything no clue as to having an understanding or the knowledge of different media conventions. Furthmore we carried out preliminary ancilliary tasks for both AS and A2 coursework which when using media conventions in these was new to most of us students. Our AS coursework consisted of creating a music magazine that had to include a front cover, contents page and a double page spread featuring out artist article. Once convention that I incorporated was the rule of thirds. This helped assist me with the direction and placement of the cover image and double page spread by dividing it up into 3 sections that the magazine reader and audience would be drawn to. From looking at current music magazines such as NME and daze that have the same genre to what I wanted to create helped and inspired me, looking at websites such as 'dazeddigital' and reading creative photography books. This allowed me to gain a better understanding of what conventions I should consider to include in order for my final product to be successful. My front cover used the basic magazine conventions such as, coverlines, capturing interesting image, masthead, captions and a barcode. I then continued and passed on with these real conventions in my contents page and the double page spread article that included a large image stretched across one whole side of the double page spread, a masthead inspired, a kicker and collumned text boxes which held the article content and information about my artist. I feel that I implemented a bricolage idea in my music magazine as I was inspried and took some ideas from a variety of different sources and was then able to apply these similar features within my individual work. As for my contents page, this had a patiche which has the meaning of a direct copy and mine contents was the same as one of NME's contents page, with the same colour scheme, the idea of 'band index' going down the side and band images place in similar places. The contents page is more than likely to be the first thing the target audeince will turn to when they open the magazine therefore this meant that I wanted it to be colourful, realistic, professional and easily readable for the audience. I was able to achieve this by using the conventions taught to me through the different examples that I was able to see. I attempted to use the conventions I learn't as effectively as I could. There was also an element of intertexuality as the reader will be familiar with the conventions I let inspire me from current music magazines. From having the ability and knowledge to understand different conventions needed for a successful music magazine I could develop them with my creative ideas to make it more interesting and eye capturing. I also thought about certain conventions I used during AS and applied it to my A2 ancillary texts. By looking at album artworks from a variety of different music genres, interesting wesbites such as dazeddigitial and also looking at exisiting music videos on YouTube when planning my video, I was able to gathered information of what conventions I had to use for my digipak, advert and music video. In mine and Sammy's music video we used variety of colour, lipsyncing, jumpcutting and interesting styling with the costumes. These particular conventions were easier to interpret due to already having the knowledge about conventions for a music magazine. When it came to planning our music video we wanted to make somethingcreative and that wasn’t too similar to any other videos however by interpurting current videos this would reinforce that since it was already used in exisiting videos by us copying it would allow our video to be good as a similar videos that already exsists. However we did use intertexual references such as some of theshots we used were originally used in the video 'Alfie’ by Lily Allen. Another convention that we challenged in the music video was the empy white background mise-en-scene. Orignally we wanted a kitchen location video, with simple shots. But in the end the video consisted of using a white background studo with simple props to help make it more intersting and make up for having no background.
