The Chronicles of the Bad Apple (Touhou Meets CNN)

The ever-popular shooter whose music dominates every Comiket release, Touhou, had this awesome stylized shadow art music video made for a vocal arrangement of a song from the game. The music video for “Bad Apple!” has seen unprecedented success among the flood of fanmade Touhou stuff out there.

Recently, someone took the video, which runs at 30fps, and printed out every individual frame. Then they took photos of each printed frame and put the pieces of paper in different positions around a room and also moved the camera around to further emphasize the various “movements” within the video. After the jump, you can see this video, plus CNN’s inability to talk about the video. It’s fun watching old people try to talk about viral videos and always be three steps behind.

So this is the aforementioned video of printed images. This is really impressive work, of course. So impressive it was, that after enough people on Twitter told CNN they should care about this video, and since CNN seems to think anything said on Twitter should be reported, they did a short segment on the newest “Bad Apple!” video. CNN’s “interpretation” of the video below.

Let’s just take a few notes on all the stupid things said, so we can feel superior in our nerd-dom and laugh at the poor news anchors who had to talk about this.

1. “It was number one for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Number one by what standards? Does he think this was like, a music video on mainstream Japanese TV? Does he even know what Nico Douga is? Probably not. They also fail to mention Touhou or the fact that the music is related to a game at all. Which means your geeky secret is still safe from “the world.”

2. “This is how they made it.” This is the most hilarious part. “They take you behind the scenes.” They think the printed images video is the original. That someone hand-drew each frame and printed it out and filmed it, and that’s how the music video was made. How do you make such an incredibly stupid logical leap? I have no idea.

3. The female announcer, who is basically there for the sake of making reactions, is plainly idiotic. “I’d have to watch that over and over again to get the attraction.” It’s shadow art. It looks cool. Chicks dressed up as witches throw around apples and stuff. It looks cool. What’s to get?

Alright, now that I have reveled in my own superiority, we want to hear from you. So leave some comments. We certainly haven’t torn the CNN video apart entirely, and there’s plenty more to be said about the Touhou phenomenon that I don’t even want to get into. So chime in, my gaijin otaku brethren!