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Throbbing Hive with John Moe: Frinkiac and 'The Chickening'

  Play Now [4:56]

by John Moe

February 09, 2016

The Chickening
Classic Film Remix by Nick DenBoer & Davy Force.
YouTube

Every Tuesday at 7:30 a.m., John Moe stops into the Morning Show to share the latest news in technology.

This week, John Moe stopped by The Current's Morning Show to talk to Jade and Sean McPherson about Frinkiac – the Simpsons search engine and "The Chickening" – a poultry remix of "The Shining".

Frinkiac is a search engine for nearly 3 million Simpsons quotes and screen caps. Made by Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte and Allie Young, the site says it's "for people who love The Simpsons, to enhance and enable that love."

"You type in what you're looking for – monorale, grumpy old man, whatever it is – your sort of favorite, semi-realized memory of a Simpsons episode," John says, "and then it will populate your search results with screen caps and dialogue from the show that you can then look up and find."

At that point you can share your image on social media and suddenly, just like that, you have created a meme.

Elsewhere in The Hive lies "The Chickening", a short film that debuted at Sundance 2016. Nick DenBoer and Davy Force remade the trailer to "The Shining" into a fever dream including a "Chickenworld" amusement park, Danny with a mustache and mutton chops and random chickens inserted into many scenes.

"If you remember the 'Too Many Cooks' video that was going around a while ago, the sort of same grotesque, no-longer-funny-but-funny comedy style is at work here," John said.

John said the short played at the Sundance Film Festival as a trailer for a movie, and he says he hopes the full version of the movie does not exist anywhere. "It's funny," John says, "but it may in fact haunt your dreams."

John Moe co-hosts the podcast Conversation Parade (with Open Mike Eagle) on the Infinite Guest network, and is an author of a number of books, including The Deleted Emails of Hilary Clinton: A Parody and Dear Luke, We Need To Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences.