August 17, 2008

China's regulators have started looking askance at China's bubbling online "spoof" (恶搞 or "egao") scene, and new restrictions are coming. In recent months several high profile parody videos have rocketed to popularity on the Internet. The phenomenon was quite nicely covered a few weeks ago by this thorough post on the Virtual China blog.

One of the better known spoofs is a wicked parody of director Chen Kaige's overwrought film, The Promise, called The Bloody Affair of the Steamed Bun, and created by a young man named Hu Ge (downloadable here, but 50MB and in Chinese). Hu's parody earned him a lawsuit from the humor-impaired director, later dropped.

--more at CNET Asia--