Post by thpz on Sept 22, 2021 5:31:50 GMT
Back in late 1999 I remember watching an online video that was a parody of The Blair Witch Project involving Donkey Kong (sort of like The Scooby Doo Project but less creepy). Like the Blair Witch, it was basically a group of people with VHS cameras investigating a mystery, except instead of trying to find the Blair Witch they were trying to find Donkey Kong himself (I think). Each episode was only a minute or two long from what I remember, which makes sense considering video bandwidth constraints back then. The only moment I remember clearly was a scene where the crew reacts to a pile of bananas in the woods, a parody of the rock pile scene in Blair Witch.
So tonight I did a bit of digging on archive.org and was able to confirm this was a real thing that was hosted on the official Donkey Kong website: web.archive.org/web/20000229123423/http://www.donkeykong.com:80/high/project_menu.html
Unfortunately all the videos were hosted using remotely hosted RealPlayer .ram files, which lead to dead RTSP streams. Here are links to each of the original episode pages with the episode names I was able to find. Each leads to a blank page containing an embedded RealPlayer .ram link:
And a couple screenshots:
I'm not 100% sure what the official name of this series was since most of the image links are dead, so I'm just going with the obvious title of "The Donkey Kong Project."
During my search I noticed another video series hosted on the site (also using RealPlayer) called DK64 Beatdown. Here are the links to each of those episode pages as well:
And some screenshots:
Based on the screenshots I'm guessing these were a series of animated shorts that involved a news anchor talking about each of the kongs.
There's also a series of videos with the prefix "mostwanted". All the image links are dead unfortunately. I'm guessing it was like DK64 Beatdown but it focused on the bosses in the game:
And another series with the prefix "realjungle". All the image links are dead here too save for the title of Episode 1:
And another series with the prefix "konga". Appears to be videos relating to each level in the game:
And another series with the prefix "rapattack". Some kind of DK rap contest?
There's probably more I'm missing, but I'm primarily interested in the Blair Witch parody videos. Since all these videos were hosted using remote RealPlayer embeds I'm not sure they were ever archived properly, but who knows.
