Sentence mixing did not come from the Youtube Poop. It has been used before, generally to create a bizarre environment in a work or serve as a means to blackmail someone via a carefully calculated edited message. It is not something many people did give thought to before though. The rise of it's usage and it's interest has come from the YTP. And why wouldn't it? It's one of the most entertaining ways to edit a video outside of create an effect extravaganza. The sentence mix is an art unto it's own since it has manage to delight and amaze us with it's absurdity and it's ingenuity. Who knew that by making a few cuts here and there you could make anyone say anything, even the most idiotic or profound things imaginable. It provided a gateway to thousands of possibilities and jokes and has even been the staple of some of the greats in the Youtube Poop world. But what goes behind the craft of the sentence mix? How can you make a sentence mix work to your favor? These sort of questions are what I will be looking into as we dive into what makes a sentence mix succeed.
Like I mentioned in The Importance Of Sources, the source(s) are crucial to making a sentence mix work. If the source is foreign or garbled, it only works if you're appealing to a niche demographic or if you're really good. It's always in the interest of a pooper to generally get audio that's clear, has excellent enunciation and has a lot of dialogue for the sentence mix to carry the greatest effect and have many possibilities. It make take a lot of repeat listenings, but by the time that you get through hearing it over and over, you'll be constructing the lines in your head. It helps as well to have a transcript and to see what parts you can break up and re-arrange to your liking. That and a few classes on linguistics and having a superb knowledge on phonetics certainly helps.
A good way to understand sentence mixing is by examples. For instance, let's take a few lines from the opening from Faces Of Evil:
Let's suppose that I wanted young, innocent, naive, little Link to say something crass. In this instance, I would like him to say something along the lines of "I'm gonna jack off". I can't really say exactly that with what I have on display for me. Now I could look further or I could avoid sentence mixing altogether and call up the original voice actor to say it for me, but I'm pretty lazy to do both. So instead I have to think of other ways I can say what I want to say. Looking over the lines again and rearranging them, I think I've found a few parts that could work for me.
It's not as vulgar as I would like it to be, but it works to what I want to do. This is a very simplistic way of sentence mixing, simply taking words or phrases from a sentence and piecing them together to form a new sentence. Simply because it's easy doesn't mean it necessarily detracts from how humorous it can be. I mean I just made an elf-eared green-hooded manchild declare an act of masturbation. That's hilarious. Now, let's try another line.
In this instance, I'm a little more limited, but I still figure that I can come up with something humorous for the king to say. In this case, I have to go deeper and try a phonetic approach. In this instance, the audio itself can have a lot more sway than what is being said due to the inflections and accent that the speaker gives to the words. Transcripts can still help, but as always, you depend more on what you're hearing than what is written. Still, I've gotten so used to hearing this fellow that I can manage to come up with a good approximation on how I can manipulate the sentence. For instance, the King says my boy as mah boi, as we all know. If I strip away the ah sound, I can attach it to another word and perhaps change it. Adding it to peace makes pizza, but saying that all true warriors strive for it isn't funny enough. Hmm...warriors...war-riors....Warios! Of course! That's a lot more funny. By modifying the sentence phonetically, I change the meaning a lot more drastically
Here's another one, this time with Gwonam and a few other lines...
In the second part, you can see where the sounds for the third part come from. Now when it comes to phonetic sentence mixing, you may not get it entirely as accurate as you may want it to sound. As in, it may not sound as obvious as you would hope to be. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad sentence mix. That sort of contrast works well to make the sentence mix funnier. It's from the manner in which it's edited that can create a laugh as equal as the intended line. In fact, contrast can work in a different way for a sentence mix by having two different audio portions create one message. Some of them are as simple as adding a Tourette's Guy swear on top of a noun that someone says, but others can be a lot more intricate and elaborate, paving the way for a plethora of creative options.
So now we're aware of what goes behind creating a sentence mix, but what exactly is the purpose of sentence mixing? Obviously it's to be funny, but you can be funny in so many ways. Sentence mixing tends to have four main purposes in a Youtube Poop. The first of which is to create pure nonsense. A Youtube Poop's entire goal is to be confusing in a very funny way, so there's certainly no better way to do that by the classic non-sequitor sentence mix. The examples shown above fit this category as they serve no further purpose aside from being absurd. When placed in any part of the video, it can provide a delightful lead in to a visual gag that serves no extra purpose other than being humorous. Non-sequitor sentence mixing is an easy way to use this tool as it allows one to work within the limits of their video. If one can't think of anything better to put in the poop, there's not much else that can be edited from the audio that could work better or one simply thinks their edit was funny enough that not including it would be a travesty, then simply placing the silly line in the right place works fine.
An interesting thing about the examples above is that they could also be used for a more comprehensive and thoughtful sentence mix. Those lines can be part of a story involving the King creating a superb pizza that then gets taken away by a Wario which can only be defeated by the power of ball-handling. It's pretty surreal but now it could be woven in to a narrative, one that can offer an abundance of hilarity. That sort of sentence mixing is a lot more complicated because it requires a more extensive selection of dialogue to splice through and it also requires one to be more attentive to find ways to construct speech that can be kept together by some logic. It may be an improvisational process where one create the lines as they hear the audio and then arrange them in ways that make sense or it could be a vague idea that then gets shaped by the audio placed before one. While it is more complex, it is a lot more interesting than a simple non-sequitor because now it allows for the poop to revolve around something more concrete rather than having to connect random pieces together in a smooth manner.
To take sentence mixing to a further degree, we need only to look to using sentence mixing as working off of a song or a speech. This generally means that you already have what you want the character to say in mind and are simply looking for the words or sounds to imitate it. Some poopers may take the script approach to generally sentence mixing, but it can be a lot easier to work around constructing the script as you look over the audio than it would to duplicate an already established script with said audio. This is usually the funnier and the most complex of the sentence mixing because it banks off of two of the greatest elements from the sentence mix. The awkwardness of making a character say something different, and using the voice of the character to say something different. A particularly notable and enjoyable example of this to me is when they made the DK64 announcer sing Snake Eater. The DK Rap itself is already pretty funny on it's own and it owes a great deal to his voice. The voice of the DK64 announcer clearly fits for the rap genre since it has a very accented and direct tone and inflection to it, but it also suffers from trying to be so hip that rather than become painful, it becomes disastrously entertaining. To take his voice and then try to set it to a more passionate tune like Snake Eater becomes foolish since we know already that the transition from a rhythm-focused speech pattern to a more melodic one is going to be a strange one. Not to mention that when the pieces start coming together, we come across tons of shits in tone and rhythm that stem from his voice. That, coupled with the melody behind his 'singing', leads to a lot of laughs.
There's one more, particularly notable usage that the sentence mix finds itself in. That being the diss. Like rappers, poopers like to fling shit at other people, though in the latter it may not be as fervent or gruesome as a battle as the former. And there's no better way to lay the smackdown in this field than having Mama Luigi, Hotel Mario, Dr. Rabbit or Sonic call someone's punk ass out for the little bitch that they are. I remember that the first and one of the most hilarious versions of the diss sentence mix came from one of the tennis matches between Captpan6 and Deepercutt, in which a GTA character uttered 'Kro-bo-Pro-duc-tions needs to get laid'. I don't know exactly what the context of that diss came from but I do remember that I was in tears when I first heard it. The diss sentence mix oddly enough has a lot more grace and flow to it than a standard sentence mix. I don't know why that is, maybe it's because there's such a focused attempt to get the name of the target and then to humiliate them that it has to come up in a way that hits hard. Perhaps the greater reason comes from Likety's Fuck Youchew, in which Likety takes the lines from Fuck Compton and lays down one of the most extensive and aggressive call-outs in Youtube Poop history. It really captured the venom and power that comes from the diss and I figure that many who want to make their own diss look upon this video to understand how to do it best.
Sentence mixing is a grand part of the Youtube Poop identity because it is one of the ways that the pooper can play god with his material. In just a few splices and alterations here and there, anyone in the world can be made to say anything possible. Nice guys can become meanies, religious zealots can denounce their own gods, scumbags can call themselves scumbags, and innocent little cartoon characters can become sailor-mouthed perverted psychopaths. It takes on its own identity as those lines that become spliced become catchphrases of their own. Time after time, we on this site quote lines from some of the greatest poops, lines that were sentence mixed together. The popularity of YTP's sentence mixing mutated to others using it more often. The slogan of Youtube Poop, as simple as it may be, is a sentence mix. It is the key to our irreverent and dumb humor. While there is a lot more that goes into a poop, we can't deny that one of the key ways that it promotes itself is through the sentence mix. It's one of our strongest pillars and we hope to maintain it as strong as possible.
Like I mentioned in The Importance Of Sources, the source(s) are crucial to making a sentence mix work. If the source is foreign or garbled, it only works if you're appealing to a niche demographic or if you're really good. It's always in the interest of a pooper to generally get audio that's clear, has excellent enunciation and has a lot of dialogue for the sentence mix to carry the greatest effect and have many possibilities. It make take a lot of repeat listenings, but by the time that you get through hearing it over and over, you'll be constructing the lines in your head. It helps as well to have a transcript and to see what parts you can break up and re-arrange to your liking. That and a few classes on linguistics and having a superb knowledge on phonetics certainly helps.
A good way to understand sentence mixing is by examples. For instance, let's take a few lines from the opening from Faces Of Evil:
Link: Gee, it sure is boring around here.
Link: Great! I'll grab my stuff!
Link: I guess I'd better get going.
Let's suppose that I wanted young, innocent, naive, little Link to say something crass. In this instance, I would like him to say something along the lines of "I'm gonna jack off". I can't really say exactly that with what I have on display for me. Now I could look further or I could avoid sentence mixing altogether and call up the original voice actor to say it for me, but I'm pretty lazy to do both. So instead I have to think of other ways I can say what I want to say. Looking over the lines again and rearranging them, I think I've found a few parts that could work for me.
It's not as vulgar as I would like it to be, but it works to what I want to do. This is a very simplistic way of sentence mixing, simply taking words or phrases from a sentence and piecing them together to form a new sentence. Simply because it's easy doesn't mean it necessarily detracts from how humorous it can be. I mean I just made an elf-eared green-hooded manchild declare an act of masturbation. That's hilarious. Now, let's try another line.
King: My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for!
In this instance, I'm a little more limited, but I still figure that I can come up with something humorous for the king to say. In this case, I have to go deeper and try a phonetic approach. In this instance, the audio itself can have a lot more sway than what is being said due to the inflections and accent that the speaker gives to the words. Transcripts can still help, but as always, you depend more on what you're hearing than what is written. Still, I've gotten so used to hearing this fellow that I can manage to come up with a good approximation on how I can manipulate the sentence. For instance, the King says my boy as mah boi, as we all know. If I strip away the ah sound, I can attach it to another word and perhaps change it. Adding it to peace makes pizza, but saying that all true warriors strive for it isn't funny enough. Hmm...warriors...war-riors....Warios! Of course! That's a lot more funny. By modifying the sentence phonetically, I change the meaning a lot more drastically
Here's another one, this time with Gwonam and a few other lines...
In the second part, you can see where the sounds for the third part come from. Now when it comes to phonetic sentence mixing, you may not get it entirely as accurate as you may want it to sound. As in, it may not sound as obvious as you would hope to be. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad sentence mix. That sort of contrast works well to make the sentence mix funnier. It's from the manner in which it's edited that can create a laugh as equal as the intended line. In fact, contrast can work in a different way for a sentence mix by having two different audio portions create one message. Some of them are as simple as adding a Tourette's Guy swear on top of a noun that someone says, but others can be a lot more intricate and elaborate, paving the way for a plethora of creative options.
So now we're aware of what goes behind creating a sentence mix, but what exactly is the purpose of sentence mixing? Obviously it's to be funny, but you can be funny in so many ways. Sentence mixing tends to have four main purposes in a Youtube Poop. The first of which is to create pure nonsense. A Youtube Poop's entire goal is to be confusing in a very funny way, so there's certainly no better way to do that by the classic non-sequitor sentence mix. The examples shown above fit this category as they serve no further purpose aside from being absurd. When placed in any part of the video, it can provide a delightful lead in to a visual gag that serves no extra purpose other than being humorous. Non-sequitor sentence mixing is an easy way to use this tool as it allows one to work within the limits of their video. If one can't think of anything better to put in the poop, there's not much else that can be edited from the audio that could work better or one simply thinks their edit was funny enough that not including it would be a travesty, then simply placing the silly line in the right place works fine.
An interesting thing about the examples above is that they could also be used for a more comprehensive and thoughtful sentence mix. Those lines can be part of a story involving the King creating a superb pizza that then gets taken away by a Wario which can only be defeated by the power of ball-handling. It's pretty surreal but now it could be woven in to a narrative, one that can offer an abundance of hilarity. That sort of sentence mixing is a lot more complicated because it requires a more extensive selection of dialogue to splice through and it also requires one to be more attentive to find ways to construct speech that can be kept together by some logic. It may be an improvisational process where one create the lines as they hear the audio and then arrange them in ways that make sense or it could be a vague idea that then gets shaped by the audio placed before one. While it is more complex, it is a lot more interesting than a simple non-sequitor because now it allows for the poop to revolve around something more concrete rather than having to connect random pieces together in a smooth manner.
To take sentence mixing to a further degree, we need only to look to using sentence mixing as working off of a song or a speech. This generally means that you already have what you want the character to say in mind and are simply looking for the words or sounds to imitate it. Some poopers may take the script approach to generally sentence mixing, but it can be a lot easier to work around constructing the script as you look over the audio than it would to duplicate an already established script with said audio. This is usually the funnier and the most complex of the sentence mixing because it banks off of two of the greatest elements from the sentence mix. The awkwardness of making a character say something different, and using the voice of the character to say something different. A particularly notable and enjoyable example of this to me is when they made the DK64 announcer sing Snake Eater. The DK Rap itself is already pretty funny on it's own and it owes a great deal to his voice. The voice of the DK64 announcer clearly fits for the rap genre since it has a very accented and direct tone and inflection to it, but it also suffers from trying to be so hip that rather than become painful, it becomes disastrously entertaining. To take his voice and then try to set it to a more passionate tune like Snake Eater becomes foolish since we know already that the transition from a rhythm-focused speech pattern to a more melodic one is going to be a strange one. Not to mention that when the pieces start coming together, we come across tons of shits in tone and rhythm that stem from his voice. That, coupled with the melody behind his 'singing', leads to a lot of laughs.
There's one more, particularly notable usage that the sentence mix finds itself in. That being the diss. Like rappers, poopers like to fling shit at other people, though in the latter it may not be as fervent or gruesome as a battle as the former. And there's no better way to lay the smackdown in this field than having Mama Luigi, Hotel Mario, Dr. Rabbit or Sonic call someone's punk ass out for the little bitch that they are. I remember that the first and one of the most hilarious versions of the diss sentence mix came from one of the tennis matches between Captpan6 and Deepercutt, in which a GTA character uttered 'Kro-bo-Pro-duc-tions needs to get laid'. I don't know exactly what the context of that diss came from but I do remember that I was in tears when I first heard it. The diss sentence mix oddly enough has a lot more grace and flow to it than a standard sentence mix. I don't know why that is, maybe it's because there's such a focused attempt to get the name of the target and then to humiliate them that it has to come up in a way that hits hard. Perhaps the greater reason comes from Likety's Fuck Youchew, in which Likety takes the lines from Fuck Compton and lays down one of the most extensive and aggressive call-outs in Youtube Poop history. It really captured the venom and power that comes from the diss and I figure that many who want to make their own diss look upon this video to understand how to do it best.
Sentence mixing is a grand part of the Youtube Poop identity because it is one of the ways that the pooper can play god with his material. In just a few splices and alterations here and there, anyone in the world can be made to say anything possible. Nice guys can become meanies, religious zealots can denounce their own gods, scumbags can call themselves scumbags, and innocent little cartoon characters can become sailor-mouthed perverted psychopaths. It takes on its own identity as those lines that become spliced become catchphrases of their own. Time after time, we on this site quote lines from some of the greatest poops, lines that were sentence mixed together. The popularity of YTP's sentence mixing mutated to others using it more often. The slogan of Youtube Poop, as simple as it may be, is a sentence mix. It is the key to our irreverent and dumb humor. While there is a lot more that goes into a poop, we can't deny that one of the key ways that it promotes itself is through the sentence mix. It's one of our strongest pillars and we hope to maintain it as strong as possible.