Yamakasi and Maccas

Some time ago I watched a documentary on Yamakasi, which was shown here on SBS TV. SBS’s press release gives a pretty good summary of the doco. For those of you interested in seeing it, a quick search on Google, should turn up a link to it on Google VideoYouTube - I would post a link to it, but I am unsure if it was posted/approved by the copyright holder.

The doco was pretty impressive. Some parts of it were shot in Évry (just outside of Paris), where Benoit lives and I stayed last year, so a couple of places looked a little familiar. The guys (I think they were all guys) in the video have some pretty amazing ways of getting around. They scale walls, jump between tall buildings and generally have a good time getting between point A and B. Even if I had the physical strength to do half the stuff I saw them doing, I am not sure I would have the mental strength to jump between the tops of 10 storey + buildings.

I first heard about this kind of stuff from a friend of mine, he was telling me about Le Parkour. It all sounded pretty cool, albeit a bit far fetched, so much so that by the end of it I thought he was talking crap. Although Parkour is similar to Yamakasi, in that they believe in not letting physical structures impeded movement through the (urban) environment, there are some differences - primarily Yamakasi more into making it look good. I am sure for people in Australia, the Australian Pakor Association could explain the differences in more detail. There seems to be some other politics involved too, but Wikipedia is hardly an authoritative source for that kind of info.

Tonight I was watching TV and I saw an ad which from about 5 seconds in was pretty obviously for Mc Donald’s breakfast. The basic plot is that a young guy wakes up at 10:25 and so he uses Yamakasi style moves to get to Maccas by 10:30 (when they stop serving breakfast at 10:30), this is interspersed with images of “breakfast” being cooked. This isn’t the first time a large multi national (has used underground/fringe culture to sell their product, but I did find this one rather shocking. Sorry no links to the ad, this post already adds to word of mouth marketing I am sure they were hoping for.

Being vegetarian, the ad didn’t encourage me to head down to Maccas for a egg and bacon roll tomorrow morning, while jumping a few buildings and scaling a wall or 2 to get there. It make we want to watch the doco again though.