Power Hour DVDs
This was the first year that I didn’t make a “Power Hour DVD” for my return trip home for Christmas, but for the previous three years, it had been a nice little mini tradition that ensured that friends gathered for a while during the holidays and didn’t remember it when it was all over.
The Power Hour is a drinking game that I was first exposed to freshman year of college, when we gathered in someones dorm room to drink a shot of beer every minute for an hour. This particular event stands out in my memory because I ended up getting sick after the seventh minute, which resulted in much mockery and derision at the time, but when my friends got busted by our Resident Adviser 45 minutes later, I wasn’t drinking and didn’t get written up.
The original method of looking at a clock, or more accurately having a designated clock watcher who ends up getting much drunker than everyone else and whose commands of “DRINK!” get louder and more futile as the game wears on, wore thin pretty quickly. I started making CDs with 60 one-minute long songs on them that would make it more of an enjoyable affair, and discovered that by putting songs that fit your mood, especially towards the end of the CD, you could have a lot of fun with the game. Woe to the neighbors of the people who end a Power Hour CD with 3 consecutive “Livin’ On A Prayers”. Once I used Meatloaf “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” as the fake out finale at minute 59, then stuck Travis’ cover of “The Weight” on as minute sixty, only to reprise Paradise by the Dashboad Light in its entirety to blow everyones mind at the end.
The only logical next step was to make a Power Hour DVD, and as I’ve said, I’ve made three of them. Using the same principle, building intensity in terms of hilarity and emotionalness towards the end of the hour has been an interesting and fun experience, as has tracking down all the obscure clips I’ve wanted to use, which I’ve had more luck doing sometimes than others. I’m thinking about making Volume 4 soon, and figured that before I did that, I would finally utilize the powerhourdvd.com domain I registered so long ago to distribute my works to the masses. I had dreams of selling the DVDs on there, but the internet seems to be trending towards giving shit away for free these days, so that’s what I’ll do as well. You can download Vol 1 and Vol 3 right now and watch them on the computer or burn them to a DVD, Vol 2 should be up shortly. I personally think they are entertaining to watch on their own without the drinking game, but obviously they’re intended to be used with beer a plenty.
So check them out at http://www.powerhourdvd.com and then let me know if you have any suggestions of future one minute clips to use in Volume 4.
EDIT: Some quick searching round the net reveals two Power Hour vids on Google Video, but with limited source material: This one uses TV Intros and this one uses Movie Trailers. The TV Intro one kicks off with Full House, which regrettably has not surfaced on one of mine yet. There is also a brilliant iTunes Power Hour App that automatically generates a playlist of one minute songs from your iTunes playlist.
Power Hour: Just another damn thing that the kids have easier these days.