Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport
Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport[edit source]
Strainj1 10:06, August 30, 2012 (UTC)
No full review from me, just one pointer: if you wrote the song and put it up first, the article would be 10 000% more interesting than it is now. I'm itching to get to the actual song when I start reading. WHERE IS IT? Tears start welling in my eyes. Then I see it is nowhere near the article, and I close the page in full disappointment mode. (Oh all right - there's a link to it. What I say still stands: it should be up front for max interest.)-- Style 
Guide 21:12, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
- Here could add a youtube link maybe. MrN
22:00. Mar 17. 2013
- Maybe the analysis section would be better if it was done similar to one of Strainj's other articles, Imagine (song), with the lyrics in the article, and the analysis following each line. What do you think? --Snippy 05:58, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for the comments guys - I'll have a rethink about it. I always thought that maybe I should have included the lyrics in there somewhere, but because this was my first article, when i wrote it, i wasn't sure just what the correct thing to do was by uncyclopedia etiquette , I mean, I wasn't sure re-printing the actual lyrics was an "ok" thing to do. I know different now. Doing it with the same style of my "Imagine" article I'm not sure would work though, because the statements i was trying to make about each verse were meant to be succinct. Nonetheless, I shall ponder a restructure. :) thanks - Strainj1 12:38, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
| Humour: | 3 | I'm sorry for the low score, but I didn't find the page funny. For me, it didn't really work. I'll have considerably more to say about that in the Concept section.
Note that this article has two very distinct sections: The lyrics analysis, and the discussion of reactions to the song. For the purposes of the article, they clearly belong together; for the purposes of a review, they are almost two separate articles. I'll try to talk about both as I go along. |
| Concept: | 5 | In my opinion, this is a very difficult concept. The problem is you are starting with a song that is already humorous, light, and somewhat ridiculous, and you're trying to parody, make fun of, re-explain it, whatever you want to call it, in a way that makes it humorous and somewhat ridiculous. But that's exactly what it was to start with. Making it more-so is very hard.
The rather deadly result is that much of the page reads like a serious analysis of the song, or just seems to be a restatement of the lyrics themselves. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: "The first verse opens with a jolly and light-hearted wobble-board.. Well, yup, that's exactly what it does. This article seems to have been patterned after (and a parody of) the Wikipedia article of the same name. You should ask yourself, as you write each line, Could this line be used in the Wikipedia article? If the answer is yes, then there's something wrong. In this intro to the first verse, the answer is a resounding yes. Your prose could have been used on Wikipedia, unchanged. Another example is the 'platypus' verse, in which the explanation is just a straight paraphrase of the lyrics. In fact, the only verse where the explanation diverges greatly from the apparent intended meaning is in the chorus, the 'ode to the violation of the Kangaroo'. Unfortunately, I've gotten kind of bored with "sheep boots" humor; it makes me tired at this point and seems obvious and no longer surprising. Maybe someone less jaded would have enjoyed that. Anyway, at this point I've totally skewered your attempts at humorizing the song. We have to ask, could I have done any better? and if so, how? As I said to start with, I think this is a very difficult concept to work with, and maybe I would have done worse with it. However, if I were condemned to the task of writing a funny article about this song, I think the tack I would take would be to abandon all thought of sticking close to the original meaning. It's about as funny as it's going to get already, unless we go in some other direction. Instead, I would try to find a truly nasty and totally inaccurate but none the less superficially plausible interpretation of the lyrics, and work from that. Perhaps we could decide "kangaroo" doesn't mean those things that hop around in Australia, but is, rather, a veiled reference to something entirely different -- giant alien grasshoppers, or cross-breeds between humans and billabongs (where the latter, we would explain, is actually a large snake found in the Far Outback), or some kind of strange demon that crept out of the volcano which erupted near Ayers Rock in 1953. Maybe none of this has any legs, but at least it doesn't start out with the impossible task of ridiculous-izing an already ridiculous song. Anyhow that's already too much said on the lyrics analysis. Let's move on to the public reactions to the song. Your first sentence about the reaction to the "questionable" lyrics would work pretty well if the lyrics were interpreted to mean something really nasty, and the bits about the death penalty and stuff for performing the song seems pretty reasonable. (I think.) After that, we have some stuff which is apparently just plain random. Like, for instance, why China? They don't have kangaroos, aboriginals, or Rolf Harris (OTOH they do have more English speakers than all the so-called English speaking countries combined -- scary thought). The QE2 quote has an issue which I'll go into more later. The Tahrme kaingaroo... quote is delightful OTOH. When we get to 'Effects on world culture' things start to leave the rails. The problem is, as someone somewhere on Uncyclopedia has said (maybe in HTBFANJS) things should be almost believable. You want there to be a pause while it sinks in on the reader just how ridiculous the sentence they just read really is ... or maybe you want them to wonder, for a few minutes, if they've been confused all this time, and, say, the automobile companies really did stop using paint in 1998 with the advent of the color anodizing process which has been used on all cars since then. In other words, keep it close to the borders of what makes sense. The first line of "Effects on world culture..." violates this. "In 1968, during an attempted siege of Australia, George W. Bush..." Oh pleeeeeze. There is just so much wrong with this.
OK, that last one's unfair, making Bush sound ridiculous is tough for the same reason making the song sound ridiculous is tough. They both started out that way. Anyway I'm afraid I drifted off the point here, which is that it should be almost believable and it's not. Kangaroos bouncing out of concealed spaceships isn't funny -- it's senseless. Unless the kangaroos are actually something entirely different from what they seem to be, which gets back to the issue of how to interpret the song so that it's funny and not just, well, rewriting the lyrics and trying to make them more what they already are. Moving on a few lines, "the Swedish death metal band Abba" should, perhaps, have been a rollicking good laugh, but in fact they're so far from being a death metal band that, for me at least, it's a case of "Huh? oh, well, whatever...". In short, it's just too unrealistic. I couldn't believe the sentence, even for a millisecond, and there is no comedic sense in which I might consider it true, or an exaggeration to point up some particular trait of them. They're just not a metal band of any sort -- plastic, maybe, but not metal. Come to think of it, they're not plastic, either, they're bubblegum. A band that lip syncs the words in concert so their fans won't hear any glitches that weren't on the 45 which they've played so many times they're starting to hear the B side coming through backwards (oh gee did I just date myself?). The tour of Antarctica falls into the same category -- it's not believable and it's not a satire, parody, or exaggeration of anything that they ever actually did (AFAIK). The last sentence, in which we learn (unexpectedly) that the game show went bust paying out million-dollar prizes to contestants who were apparently more than happy to marry kangaroos, was good. In the context of the preceding sentences, it's plausible, unexpected, and funny. I dunno -- I hope some few bits of this rather brutal hatchet job will prove to be in some way helpful... |
| Prose and formatting: | 9 | Grammar, spelling, coherence are all good. 'This effect has been lovingly labelled a "wobble board"' is one of very few language errors which I saw in the article (the thing so labeled is the instrument, which in turn produces the effect, of course). |
| Images: | 8 | The images are good. I particularly like the one of the lounging kangaroo. |
| Miscellaneous: | 5 | I dunno, I think I said all I had to say already. |
| Final Score: | 30 | In closing, let me reiterate that I think taking the tack of treating the song realistically and making a funny article about it is tough. Either a different tack, choosing an absurd but "serious" interpretion which is diametrically different from what was intended, or using an entirely different set of lyrics (as another poster on this page suggested), might have made the task easier. |
| Reviewer: | Snarglefoop (talk) 05:35, 12 April 2014 (UTC) | |
A comment of sorts about nothing in particular - I at least don't have a big issue with statements such as the wobble board one, which state a funny truth simply as is; nothing really wrong with stating a funny truth in that case, though in the rest of the article it's more explanations of funny truths/lyrics rather than...whatever they would be if they weren't what they are, I guess. The idea is to just say something rather than spell it out, and here it would be hard to 'just say it' because the song basically already does for the most part, so best to spell out something way out there from the truth. – Llwy-ar-lawr (talk • contribs • logs) 03:30, 13 Apr 2014