My friend Rachel loves the TV show Dexter. The one about the serial killer, not the boy genius.
She also has a completely irrational hatred of Buc-ee’s, which for those of you outside Texas is a chain of enormous gas stations with a cartoon beaver on the sign and the cleanest bathrooms in the state. Everyone loves Buc-ee’s. Rachel does not love Buc-ee’s.
So for her birthday we combined the two.
The Gift
We bought a pile of Buc-ee’s beaver plush toys and gave them the full treatment, exactly as Dexter would, and then handed her the results in a trash bag. Somebody says on camera that this is sick and twisted but also one of the funniest things ever, and that is a fair summary. She loved it.
For the record, I actually like Buc-ee’s. She still hates it.
Parody Is Production Design
Here is the genuinely useful thing buried in this extremely stupid video, and I do mean it.
Parody almost never lives in the performance. Nobody in this video is doing an impression of anybody. There is no acting in it worth the name and there is certainly no script. The reference lands entirely because of three props.
Think about what you actually remember from that show’s visual language: sheeting taped over every surface, the subject wound up in cling film on a table, and a row of tools laid out in order. That is it. That is the whole look. And once you have a dining table, a roll of plastic and some cling film, you have communicated an entire television series to anybody who has seen ten minutes of it, without saying its name once.
This is worth knowing whenever you want to reference anything, because the instinct is always to go bigger, get a costume, do the voice. You usually do not need any of that. Find the two or three images the thing has trained everybody to recognise, rebuild those accurately, and let the audience do the rest. They are much faster at this than you think.
The corollary is that accuracy matters more than budget. Our plastic sheeting was from a hardware store and our victims cost about eight dollars each, but the table is dressed correctly, so it reads.
One Honest Note
The camera work here is terrible. It is handheld, at night, in a dining room, under a ceiling light, and the whole thing is soft and noisy. I am not going to defend it. But the video works anyway, which is a reminder that a clear idea shot badly beats a vague idea shot beautifully basically every time.