Inspired, if that’s the word, by the trailers for the new Angelina Jolie film Wanted, Christopher Campbell at SpoutBlog has compiled a list of “10 Awful Matrix ‘Bullet Time’ Spoofs”, and it covers the bases pretty well — though a few of his specimens, such as Wing Commander (released March 12, 1999) and the Gap’s ‘Khaki Swing’ commercial (debuted April 1998), actually pre-date The Matrix (released March 31, 1999) by a fair bit.
In fact, the people who created this special effect were expressing concern about “the spectre of overexposure” as early as this article from the June 26, 1998 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Little did they know that a movie was about to come out which would hijack the effect and stamp a catchphrase on it forever.
At any rate, I just had to say I am glad that Campbell’s list does not include Osmosis Jones (2001), which is not only one of my favorite cartoons of the past decade, but also — since it stars Laurence Fishburne as the voice of the villainous virus Thrax — features the only Matrix spoof that stars a member of the Matrix trilogy itself. Surely it deserves points for that, at least.
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