I’ve been on a bit of a YouTube football jag the past day or two.
It’s the fault of one of my blog-idols, Tom Nawrocki, whose passion for watching grainy old gridiron footage has even given birth to a blog all its own.
I already knew that a fair amount of wonderfully funky NFL Films footage can be found on YouTube. I’ve even sat through one or two of the old Monday Night Football games that occasionally pop up in their entirety before the copyright lawyers run them off.
I hadn’t realized how much amateur and youth-league footage there is out there, though.
And when you combine authentically vintage film with grandiose NFL Films-style orchestrations, you get … this.
I admit, the joke gets kind of old after a while. There’s really no need to watch this beyond the four-and-a-half-minute mark. But for a while, anyway, the combination of stentorian music and skinny 11-year-old kids strikes me as comic gold.
It works especially well when the camera actually captures a scrap of action — a sack, a gang-tackle, an interception.
The catch at about 13 seconds in, for instance, is so marvelously (if accidentally) synched to the accompanying music that I instantly heard John Facenda in my head: “But then a timely interception by Sammy Strinczak turned the tide and ended the Junior Panthers’ rally.”
This being the Meriden Junior Football League, I wonder if all the kids went out afterward for steamed cheeseburgers.
Thanks, that’s very kind of you to say.