Vid! "Born Too Late," DS9 ensemble, historical roleplay theme

[bironic]

I was going to wait to post this until after the holiday / start of the new academic year, since few people are likely to be interested to begin with, but patience, I don't have much. Here we go!

Title: Born Too Late
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Characters: Ensemble, gen, with background pairings
Length: 3:17
Music: The Clarks
Summary: Life in the 24th century has its perks, but that doesn't mean its citizens don't yearn for the days of lounge singing, princesses, pulp SF and… Vikings?
Physical/content warnings: None I can think of.
A/N: For my Kink Bingo "historical roleplay" square. Because boy, does Star Trek love playing dress-up from bygone eras of Western culture. Including pasts that occur in our own future. It's part compliment and part self-referential affection. One day there'll be a trans-Trek vid like this, complete with TOS reenacting ancient Greece and Rome and gangsters and Shakespeare and hanging out in '80s San Francisco, and TNG with its Robin Hoods and noir detectives and Westerns and Sherlock Holmes and HMS Enterprise and...
Credit: Anyway, thanks to my f-listers who tried to help me find the perfect historical roleplay song—it exists somewhere, I know it—and to kuwdora for suggesting how to deinterlace the footage.




Streaming at YouTube and Vimeo | Download MP4 (20 MB)

The YouTube version has captions. Here are the lyrics:

Vincent, will you teach me how to paint?
Teresa, will I ever be a saint?
John, I really think your songs are great
I was born too late

William, will you teach me how to write?
And Cassius, will you show me how to fight?
Thomas A., I think I see the light
I was born tonight

I've had a hard time leaving this town
I've been losing everything that I've found
I'm gonna search the sky, kiss the ground
Build it up and tear it back down

I've had a hard time leaving this place
I've been counting all the lines on my face
I'm gonna curse the sky, hit the ground
What goes up comes tumbling down
Tumbling down

Jimi, show me how you play that thing
And Elvis, will I ever be a king?
And Jerry, all the joy and love you bring
I was born to sing

Martin Luther King, show me the way
Jesus, Buddha, teach me how to pray
Christopher, I think I see the bay
I was born today
I was born today
I was born too late
I was born too late
I was born too late…



ETA: Winner of an Arbitrary Mod Prize at Kink Bingo! Hurrah!



Comments and concrit are always welcome.

This vid has shown at: Vidukon 2015 (Tropes vid show), Nine Worlds 2015 (Vid Long and Prosper vid show)

x-posted to vidding

Comments

[deelaundry.livejournal.com]

AWESOME! The song does work for it, and it is so much fun to see them all having such fun. ♥

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Woohoo, someone watched it! And liked it.

:)

Am working on a wet/messy/dirty vidlet now for the same Bingo line. 's fun so far, but hard to edit. & I sadly lack a way to snag a mud bath scene with Troi and Worf.

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

Love the video - the images flow really well, and it's sheer fun. :)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks! I was hoping you'd see & enjoy this.

And that is awesome awesome news going on on your end. Sorry for incommunicado lately - am very excited for you and will be better about saying so. *hug*

Future retrotastic!

[brendan dolan-gavitt (from livejournal.com)]

I never thought about the irony of having characters that all love recreating the past shown to an audience that desperately wants to live in the future! This was wonderful, thank you :)

Re: Future retrotastic!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

It certainly seems like a great compliment that people in the future fantasize about history instead of their own future. It's like Data having enviable ultimate computing power but wanting to be more human. Makes us feel better!

Thanks for the comment!

[no-detective.livejournal.com]

Yay! Thank you for linking to these again; I totally missed them.

This vid is like balm upon my Midnight in Paris-endured soul. It tells the same story with more spirit, humor, and bittersweet depth. ♥

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Midnight in Paris lacked Cardassians in and out of makeup, not to mention Bashir playing dressup with O'Brien and Garak, so I see your problem already. :) Also: yay you liked it!

[eloiserummaging.livejournal.com]

Hey, this is awesome! Great idea & perfect song choice. :D

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hooray! Thanks so much. I tried to find a song for a couple of months and ended up going with the one that I'd thought of originally... the loose interpretation of many of the words worked out pretty well, but I still believe there is a perfect song out there! But at least I you all didn't have to suffer through the second choice, which was a lo-fi song about playing pretend from a British children's show. :)

[sol-se.livejournal.com]

Love it!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hooray! It was so lovely to go back through the discs and put this together, and it is now equally as lovely to see a few people enjoying the outcome.

[canadian-plant.livejournal.com]

asdfghjkl; This is fantastic! I don't have anything constructive to say, just that it made me all smiley and gleeful :-D

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Yay! I am so glad to hear it.

[softestbullet (from livejournal.com)]

I love this! It gives a wonderful nostalgic feeling. <3

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, lovely, lovely. It made me feel nostalgic to make it so it's excellent to hear that it had the same effect on you (or maybe you mean that it shows how nostalgic the characters feel - which is also true!).

[endeni]

Oh, this is greatness! What a charming vid, thank you for sharing! :)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the comment! I'm so glad you found it charming. It was a lot of fun to make, and to go through all those episodes again.

[killthwight.livejournal.com]

Loved it! :D

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Yay! *waves to Bashir in your icon*

[conceptofzero.livejournal.com]

This is just perfect. I think I smiled the whole way through.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am so glad to hear that! Thank you for the comment.

[cosmic-llin.livejournal.com]

Aaah, this was so much fun! Gorgeous!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you think so! It was definitely a lot of fun to put together, and it sounds like that's coming through. Thanks for the comment!

[eruthros]

Oh, man, I just watched this and it is amazing. Wow.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Your comment and rec made my night. I would have said so at the time had I not gotten home so late. & I think you've brought in like 1/3 of the comments here, now. Thank you!

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

This is adorable!!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you think so! Thanks muchly for the comment!

[saffronhouse.livejournal.com]

what a great, happy-making vid! awesome!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Yay, thank you so much!

[redangel618.livejournal.com]

this is an amazingly fun vid.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

So glad to hear it!

[shinealightonme]

Oh man, this is so perfect. Full of glee and great clip choice!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hooray, thanks! & I love your icon.

[isagel.livejournal.com]

Awwwwww. I admit I got tears in my eyes at the Martin Luther King bit. I always manage to forget how deeply I love the Sisko-as-sf-writer ep, and how much Sisko is allowed to actually care about race. (When I was working on my gambling multi vid - which was eaten by a computer crash but may one day be reconstructed - the perfect antidote to realizing that, d'uh, in the original Ocean's Eleven movie, there are no decent shots of Sammy Davis Jr gambling, because his character wouldn't be allowed in the casino, was then moving on to the DS9 holodeck casino episodes where Sisko textually is upset about exactly that. Hm. I wonder if you'd find a tv series made now that directly addresses the erasure of racism in stories set in a past historical period.) Anyway, this vid is marvellous, and I love it! <3333

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much. That line was one of the more difficult ones, because it could have gotten too heavy/inappropriate for this vid (like Jake in the SF AU getting shot by not!Dukat and not!Weyoun, and Sisko getting beaten when he tried to protest), or too light, or too complicated -- one of the alternatives to the tear-filled speech in that episode (which obviously I ended up going with because it is just so powerful and passionate) was just what you mention above, where Sisko decides to don his tux and stride into that holo-casino because he can. I'd hoped a part of that point might come across in the group and/or money-throwing clip for people who remember that discussion in the episode. So it's really awesome to see you bring it up here.

I also hope you do get back around to reconstructing that vid; it sounded so exciting. But I know how much the wind can get sucked out of one's sails after a computer problem. There's an SGA vid I've had to remake twice now, and it's taken months between each construction to get the enthusiasm back. (Not helped by the fact that it's a depressing vid.)

Um, in short: thank you! I'm glad you saw this; had been hoping you would catch it some way or another.

[thingswithwings.livejournal.com]

Buddy, I ADORED this vid. Just, completely adored it. I have watched it like four times since I saw it existed last night. And as I watched it, I laughed out loud and clapped and grinned 4evs. You do such a beautiful job of incorporating all the different types of historical roleplay (holodeck, time travel, meta scifi writers episode) into the huge kink the show has for that kind of nostalgia. And your matchups for the names were all great (I love how it starts, with Vincent will you teach me how to paint - Sisko and his baseball! The foundational metaphor of the show is historical nostalgia!) and and and. I really loved it! I will watch it often!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so glad to read this. I'd been hoping you would see this vid and the Peanuts vid when you-as-mod acknowledged my Bingo, but you had just posted your Voyager vid and are probably up to your eyeballs in people's Bingo announcements anyway, and whatever, you came across it in the end and liked the portrayal of the variety of historical roleplay scenarios the show wallowed in, which made the characters happy and it makes you happy and thus it makes me happy! Holodeck adventures and misadventures and plain old yearning. When I saw the scene where Bashir was all, "Quark, OMG, no drinks on the model!", it struck me all over again how much the DS9 crew are like us fans today... but with better technology. Oh, what fangirls might achieve with a holodeck!

[sophinisba]

Gosh, this was so much fun to watch. :D

[bironic.livejournal.com]

So glad to hear it! Thanks a bunch.

[themadlurker.livejournal.com]

This is awesome and glee-inducing!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! Thanks for saying so.

[livrelibre.livejournal.com]

That is so much fun!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you found it so!

[ashpags.livejournal.com]

Hi! I found this via a rec from such_heights (http://such-heights.dreamwidth.org/357865.html) and just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the vid! Great song and clips. Thanks for putting it together! =)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, hooray! Thanks very much. It was hard to settle on a song for this one, but I think it turned out to be a fine match in the end. Glad you enjoyed! & thanks for letting me know how you found the vid. :)

[roga.livejournal.com]

I've only ever watched like one episode of DS9, but this was so cute and awesome and the song fit perfectly (and sounds great too!), and it is one of the most original fills I can imagine for this square. So great <3

[bironic.livejournal.com]

I'm so pleased you gave it a try and that the emotions, the joy these characters take in reenacting the past, came through! I don't know how brainwaves like this happen, but as soon as I thought of this show for this square I knew I had to do it.

[chamilet]

Excellent!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Thank you!