Guardians Of The Galaxy/Mass Effect Trailer Mash-Up Is The Best Yet
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The Guardians of the Galaxy trailers have been a blast pretty much from the moment director James Gunn premiered the first footage at Comic-Con a few years ago, accompanied by the rousing strains of Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling.” Recently YouTuber The Unusual Suspect delivered a particularly fun mash-up, combining the structure and soundtrack from one of Guardians’ latest trailers with footage from George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy — this time with Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” providing the tunes. Now somebody has riffed on that riff and given us a hybrid of Guardians of the Galaxy and the Mass Effect video game series…and it’s kind of perfect.
Of course, YouTube masher-upper Zeb Ekeroth was working with game cutscenes rather that live-action footage, so there’s a limit to how well he can match things up — the lips and the audio rarely match up, but that’s not that big a deal. Especially because Zeb has done a great job of matching material from the Mass Effect games with the characters and situations of Guardians of the Galaxy. It helps that Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard assembled quite a motley crew of companions over the course of three games, so there are easy matches for Guardians’s core line-up of “a thief, two thugs, an assassin, and a maniac” — Kasumi, Zaeed & Grunt, Thane, and Jack, for the ME fans keeping track.
It’s the little touches that make this particular mashup work so well. Zeb finds several ways to thematically or literally match moments from the Guardians trailer. We get Shepard matching Star-Lord’s impressive leap near the beginning. We get the Normandy approaching that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the space station Omega…a stand-in for Guardians’ similar “Knowhere.” Tweaking Rocket’s “Oh yeahhhhh” line for Legion? Genius. Realizing that “I am Grunt” is a perfect substitute for “I am Groot”? Brilliant. And I actually laughed out loud when Thane said, “What the hell, I don’t got that long a lifespan anyway.” It’d be relatively easy just to slap together some Mass Effect footage with the Guardians trailer audio, but Zeb went the extra mile to make this really work across the board. Kudos, sir.
You can watch the original and Zeb’s mashup side-by-side below. It’s damned impressive how well he matched things up. As for Guardians of the Galaxy, it hits theaters on August 1.
