Artist Jonathan McIntosh presents 30 of the best and most notable mashup videos from before the age of YouTube:
Political remixes can be traced back to the 1920s, when Soviet filmmakers like Esfir Shub recut American Hollywood films to give them a sharper class commentary. During World War II, Charles A. Ridley created (and gave away for free) the first viral political mashup by reediting footage of Nazi soldiers to make them appear to dance and sing to the tune “The Lambeth Walk.” When VCRs became more widely accessible in the early 1980s, UK artists calling themselves video scratchers appropriated television footage to create biting critiques of pop culture media and Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies [and] recut television commercials and music videos to provide a feminist critique.
