Director Danny Madden's short film 'All Your Favorite Shows' is a wild and arty send-up of the supercut.

The "supercut," defined by supercut.org as a "fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV," is basically internet crack. Ever since the term was coined back in 2008, we've seen all sorts of media get dissected and reformed into often hilarious, bizarre, and infinitely re-watchable pop-culture candy.

Due to the smorgasbord of media to cut from, I'm only going to focus on narrative movie and TV supercuts/mashups. Initially, the incredibly time-intensive cuts began with modest goals, generally editing together a single word or phrase from a single character/film, but then they graduated to cliché expressions across hundreds of movies, like, "Where's The F#@%ing Money?!?!" and "(S)he's Right Behind Me, Isn't (S)he?", before tackling overdone tropes like photo enhancement, phone calls, table flips, cats, sword fights, and talking dirty in bed. Next came the cinematic tropes like slow motion, having your back to the camera, dutch angles, breaking the forth wall, and saying the movie title in the movie.

Then people thought, Well, cinema is art, right? So they analyzed their favorite director's work and pulled out color schemes, film shots, and even things as niche as supercuts of eyes and mouths. Some people took it a little overboard. That caused some actors like Nicolas Cage, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Gary Oldman, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Daniel Day-Lewis to get really mad about it. Soon you couldn't tell Kubrick from Hitchcock, everything had been so blended. Was the internet destroying the movies and TV we loved? Fortunately for us, every movie and TV character gathered together in a place called Hell's Club, where they sang a little song, did a little dance, and made a lot of love.

Then there was nothing. Silence.

It was over. All of your favorite films and shows had been documented, reassembled, and re-appropriated until no more could be done with them. But then, of course, a filmmaker had to go and make that into a movie, aptly titled All Your Favorite Shows! That person was Danny Madden, filmmaker/animator extraordinaire at Ornana Films. Premiering earlier this year at the SXSW Film Festival, the short takes supercuts to the next level by doing something they seldom do: Tell a story. And, in keeping in line with supercuts destroying our attention span, it is a story of a young media-obsessed boy who finds the lines between fiction and reality quickly blurring. Madden's film is intended to be a cautionary tale about media, but may in fact be one for supercuts/mash-ups, too. Maybe we all need to put down our phones, shut down our computers, and look away from our tablets. You can always watch something later—well, except this. Watch this now and then read my interview with Danny beneath the film.

VICE: Where did this project/film idea come from?
Danny Madden: Little bit from my life, little bit from observing other people's lives.

Are you trying to make some big commentary on our modern, hyper-commercialized world about how basically everything we experience is just a facet of something before us and there's no originality in stories today?
Ha, "big commentary." I'd say I have a lot of questions about what all this media in our faces means. Does how we're ingesting it devalue the content? How our dwindling attention spans [are] shaping how new art is made? What does it mean when we're more interested in what's on the device than what's actually in front of us?

Regardless, it must have taken forever to find and organize all of these clips. How did you go about it?
Not forever. We began the process in October 2014 and finished in February 2015. Myself and a few friends spent a lot of time together researching and animating and cutting and painting. If it wasn't fun, it would've taken a lot longer.

Are the film scenes selected actually all of your favorite shows?
Almost all of them are in there.

What are you working on now?
My first music video. Playing with creating from someone else's art and having fun with it.

Thanks, Danny. I'm going to close my eyes now.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. Follow him on Twitter.