Variations on a Theme: Dog on a Skateboard

We have all seen the classic internet video of the dog riding a skateboard. It was one of the first big YouTube videos, and it even got a place in an iPhone commercial. But much like all great art, you can’t just keep making the video over and over again hoping to capture some of the original video’s magic. If one wants to set themselves apart from all the other dog-riding-a-skateboard videos out there, one must step back and evaluate just what made the original video so special in the first place. In the case of the original video, the draw of the dog riding a skateboard was the fact that a dog was riding a skateboard.

With this in mind, one must take into account modern sensibilities and tastes.  Just as Citizen Kane told the story of a single character that was obsessed with his own success within a burgeoning political landscape, There Will Be Blood told the same type of story but with a center on the American obsession with oil and the greed that comes along with it. One must treat the dog riding a skateboard video in the same manner: Take the original concept and update it without losing what made the original so good.

The video above pulls this off beautifully. At first, we are privy to the same, hackney schlock that we have seen dozens of times over. But the videos’ creator then tosses us, the audience, a variation on a classic theme. Rather than have the pooch complete his skateboarding journey, he instead, crashes head first in to a garbage can in a comical fashion. This is then accentuated by the replay and slowdown of the closing moments of the video.

In the original video, the dog seems carefree and happy. He is accomplishing a feat that no other dog could have done at the time. In the new video, the dog seems unwilling to ride the skateboard. It almost seems as if his owner were trying to fabricate the entire situation in order to gain a small semblance of fleeting internet fame. But, rather than accomplishing his goal, the dog crashes and the entire experiment ends as a colossal failure. (Metaphor for American’s current economic problems?)

There is perhaps no better critique on our modern society and the crumbling of the world we used to know than Skateboarding Dog Fail. Centuries from now, internet scholars will look back on this video as a metaphor for our current woes.