Scooby Road

Vid
Title:	Scooby Road
Creator:	Luminosity
Date:	2005
Format:
Length:	43 minutes
Music:	The Beatles' Abbey Road album
Genre:
Fandom:	Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Footage:
URL:	streaming at Critical Commons
DVD cover case and disc, click to see larger version
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Scooby Road, by Luminosity, is a fan-created art work that uses the entirety of The Beatles' Abbey Road album set to source footage from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was the first concept album vid, created in 2005 and premiered at the Vidder Showcase at Vividcon that same year. Luminosity's vids were featured in New York Magazine in 2007.

Reviews/Reactions

"The shared group experience made this a truly spiritual experience. As if we were all saved, and we were. Luminosity gave us a sense of closure and a comfort level that the ending of Buffy did not." ~ vagabondage

Two contemporaneous reviews from Vividcon where the vid premiered:

• The highlight of VVC: Luminosity's Scooby Road by laurashapiro
• Vividcon- Scooby Road by vagabondage

Later reactions:

• "For the uninitiated, that's the Beatles' album Abbey Road, all of it, providing the musical background to some of the most brilliant vids made from the show Buffy The Vampire Slayer - all seven seasons - I've had the pleasure to watch. About 43 minutes, and everyone worth seeing."
• "I also finally got to see Luminosity's "Scooby Road" -- which is, wow, just -- just *brilliant*. Sometime around 10th grade I fell in love with the Abbey Road album and listened to it over and over and OVER again. It's been a while since I've listened to it straight through, but it all came flooding back, and some of the song/image choices were so great (her friends -- esp. Xander and Willow-- for Here Comes the Sun; Polythene Pam for the Buffy 'bot; She Came in Through the Bathroom Window for Dawn). I loved the way she used "You Never Give Me Your Money" for Buffy/Angel, and then the way it comes back at the end when Angel does. Really, all of side 2 was just *genius*."
• "Seriously. I could talk about Scooby Road all day, but the bottom line is: this is something everyone who watches vids at all should see. I mean that. Download it now and watch it when you can. This is fucking masterwork. I plan to have my copy bronzed." Read the entire review here.
• "I finally found the vid that communicated the genre’s emotional sense: Scooby Road, Luminosity’s 2005 concept album remixing Abbey Road with the full series run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Much of why this vid works so well for me, besides it just being a spectacularly impressive work of editing, is that I come to it with strong emotional connections to both works – I’ve been a lifelong Beatles fan, and Buffy stands as one of the great works of television art. Vidding demands context, both within the community of fans who consume it, and to communicate outside that fandom to draw links between the songs, the shows, and the viewer’s experiences.....the entire vid offers emotional resonances both within moment-to-moment stories she spins, and more so in connection to what a viewer brings to Scooby Road via their own media experiences and memories. I haven’t watched Buffy in years, so much of my experience was embracing the flood of memories that the album offered. And I know Abbey Road so well, that the comfort of recontextualizing the music with another beloved text led to personal resonances and moments of anticipation."
• "So, [Scooby Road] was great. The only problem I have with Luminosity as a vidder is that she's really good, but her taste/POV is somewhat different to mine, so a lot of her very popular vids don't quite work for me (although others totally do, she has several entries on my previous post) even though I can appreciate them on an intellectual level. That was somewhat the case here if you take each vid individually, and to begin with I thought "Oh, this is ok, but it's just like watching a random sequence of Buffy vids to Beatles songs". But about halfway through the second vid it kind of clicked for me and I started thinking of each vid as a facet of a larger picture of the show, and being the total sucker I am for long-form multiple-facet connected storytelling was hooked. It's not that it tells a single narrative (other than that of the show) in any obvious way, and it doesn't even quite follow the chronology, but somehow they all tie together and follow on from each other, and the finale was very satisfying in an "end of a novel not a short story" kind of way."
• "There is a central theme on BtVS and that is basically we-are-stronger-together-than-apart. Simple and effective and the show keeps coming back to it again and again. Buffy thinks it is all about Power and she is right and wrong. It is all about sharing the power. Power alone corrupts. It weakens and it kills. When you are surrounded you are stronger and the power is much more effective and it can be triumphant and healing. Luminosity threads this idea throughout Scooby Road, setting up the viewer with each song for the most amazing viewer smackdown of a medley man has ever seen! The really cool thing here? You do not know that this is what she is doing - the manipulation and the hand at play is very adept and the emotions that well up on first viewing (and second and third and forth and so on) are so overwhelming that it is very hard to get at what this video is doing to you and why. You just pretty much know, "Buffy!!! OMGBUFFY!""

See also

• "Come together": a fanvid insight on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fandom, an academic analysis of the vid