‘Snakes on a Plane’ and collaborative geekiness

Sight unseen, the movie has grown from something of a joke into a phenomenon slithering untamed throughout the Internet.

As a movie whose fan base has grown spontaneously and organically, "Snakes" is relatively rare.

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Chris Rohan of Bethesda, Md., created an elaborate, R-rated audio trailer that lovingly mocks the title and movie. "It's a genius title," Rohan said. "It's so stupid it's great. It invites satire, but it's something you just love. It's something I can't explain. You either get it or you don't."

The audio bit uses a Jackson sound-alike shouting, "I want these mother------- snakes off the mother------- plane!" Soon, the growing legion of fans added their voices as they demanded that that phrase also appear in the movie.

Apparently, the studio got the hint. When [director David] Ellis assembled Jackson and others for the recent [re]shoot, the filmmakers added more gore, more death, more nudity, more snakes and more death scenes. And they shot a scene where Jackson does utter the line that fans have demanded.

How cool is that?

Rohan is right: You either get why “snakes on a plane” -- as a title and as a concept -- is hilarious, or you don’t. (I suspect, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it’s a generational thing: my mom and yours would probably say it sounds dumb. But of course, that’s why it’s hilarious.) You can’t explain it, and New Line could never have deliberately set out to create the kind of buzz geeks have generated on their own. As the Reuters article points out, the studio and seemingly everyone else involved -- except Jackson -- failed to appreciate what they had on their hands with that title. But at least now they seem to get it, and are maybe having as much with it as we seem to be having. Not that I generally condone filmmaking by committee, but in this case I think it’s safe to say that Snakes on a Plane was never gonna be High Art, and now it might even be more fun than it would have been.

For more SoaP fun, see Snakes on a Blog. And remember, this was all preordained: as someone called Tongodeon points out at his/her LiveJournal blog, Michael Stipe, “our generation's Nostradamus,” predicted the this in the first verse of “It's the End of the World As We Know It”:

That's great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, an aeroplane
Lenny Bruce is not afraid

And I’m not afraid, either. But I will make a prediction of my own: SoaP will be released at least a month earlier than August 18: I'm gonna say July 14.