The cast of Mad Men "sing" Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"

I post this not just because it's the cast of AMC's Mad Men performing Rick Astley's famous Rick-rolling anthem one word at a time, but also because of the sheer man hours spent looking for each word in the lyrics being said at any point during the show's first four seasons -- which, if every episode is about 42 minutes, amounts to about 36 and a half hours of Mad Men -- and then editing them all together, to music, in order to create the appearance of an assembled song. Please, bask in appreciation of YouTube user Buchan39's efforts. Quick update 9/5: Wasn't sure yesterday if the video was created for or by standup comedian Richard Sandling -- it was, indeed, created by the comedian himself. (Thanks, Pete!)

When she isn't nerding out that the holidays are coming, Jamie is a reader at Monday Night Fan Fiction at Fontana's in Chinatown, NYC (next date: TBA, 7:00 PM). All work is original, written by the readers, so if you have a brilliant fanfic idea stuck in your head, send it via Twitter: @jamielikesthis

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http://www.tavie.com Tavie

This is what the internet is for.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=734165980 Rob Duncan

I’m sure the people who do these videos have the scripts and sit and ctrl f for the word they’re looking for, rather than watching hours and hours of footage. Doesn’t make it any less cool, just using common sense.
- http://newnumber6.livejournal.com Peter
  
  Yeah, and some videos have closed captioning subtitles that give, more or less the exact timestamp of the quote in question.
- http://www.youtube.com/user/ziccup akbar56
  
  As someone who makes these kinds of supercuts, this is exactly what we do. One would go mad trying to compile something like this without a script/subtitle file to search through.
oscar

I’m sure this person used the subtitles to find the words as opposed to sitting through every episode. That said, this is awesome.
http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

I’m surprised by the number of instances of the word “dessert” they found. Makes me wonder if that’s what started this off.
- http://www.madziabryll.com Cefeida
  
  Exact same thought.
  - Petzl
    
    dessert?
- http://twitter.com/csismeiro Carlos Sismeiro
  
  Never gonna give it up, I will never desert dessert.
GersonOnTheT

Very impressive–and it’s hard work no matter how you do this! However, I’ll bet they used a phonetic search tool like Boris Soundbite. You load however many hours of footage you have into a project file and Soundbite (and similar tools) will index it all. Not by words, but by sounds. Very, very cool software. I would guess (without having any inside information) that The Daily Show and Colbert Report staff must use phonetic searching to make those amazing cuts of many, many TV news personalities and politicians repeating the same talking points over and over.
mikedt

This is either way easier to do than I think it is, or this person has some serious spare time on his hands.
http://twitter.com/filmgeek Jeff Greenberg

This show is edited with Avid Media Composer. There’s a feature called Phrasefind. It’s not as easy as “control F” but almost. http://www.avid.com/US/products/PhraseFind
http://www.facebook.com/people/Tom-Rombouts/100001468788152 Tom Rombouts

Hi – Just to give credit where credit is due, I wonder if they were inspired by the old Dr. Demento favorite “Spliceway to Heaven” I think this is it online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGlV58-dyM
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Wonder if William Burroughs is sitting smiling somewhere watching this? Dude had mad prophecy skills.
http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

Also: Never going to say “good spy”? :s