No maybe about it — mashup of ‘Batman,’ ‘Call Me Maybe’ a definite hit for alumni

Batman is the latest to leap into the
Call Me Maybe
viral parody mania, this time propelled by the creative juices of Chapman University alumni who mashed up two of the summer’s hottest pop culture sensations –
The Dark Knight
movie hit and that perky
Carly Rae Jepsen
melody bouncing around in everyone’s noggin.

The tune gets the full Black Knight treatment in a comic video directed by communications graduate Wesley Freitas ’04. The nearly four-minute video was posted Saturday, Aug. 5, and attracted 200,000 views in two days. As of this writing it had topped 800,000 views. No one’s more surprised than Freitas.

“I didn’t expect it to go like this, but it’s really cool,” said Freitas, who used an all-Chapman alumni crew to shoot, edit and process the video in a two-week blast of creativity wedged in around his day job as head of manufacturing for a sunglasses start-up. Other alumni involved included Tyler Trautman ’07, Jonathan Bruno ’10 and Tashi Trieu ’10.



Freitas even borrowed Batman duds from another bunch of Batman-loving alumni who created a caped crusader fan film called
Batman: Puppet Master
.

And budget? Not much. The Wayne estate in the video is a friend’s house in Irvine and the Gotham City nightscape is the view from Freitas’ Los Angeles office. Freitas himself plays Gotham City cop John Blake and True fans don’t mind.

“Oh my gosh I almost peed my pants laughing at this,” one fan posted on the YouTube site.

All that viral love accrued thanks to a host of bloggers that featured the video, from the man-centric “Thursdays Are from Mars” feature on
The Oprah Blog
to Wired Magazine’s
Geekdad
. The video also picked up viral juice from
Ryan Seacrest
,
MTV
and
Variety
. Initially, Freitas wasn’t aware of how well the Batman video was doing because he was traveling in Hawaii and was a bit off the grid.

“In Hawaii my internet is held together by coconut husks,” he joked.

But he had designed the project to gain some online traction, deliberately combining “the two most pop culturish things of the moment” into one video. He first thought of writing the “Call Me Maybe” riff as a Cat Woman song, but changed his mind after attending an opening-night screening of “The Dark Knight.” He went home and wrote his lyrics that night.

Then the following morning he awoke to news of the Aurora mass shooting and seriously considered scrapping the whole project. Instead, he chose to proceed. He and his fellow filmmakers are hoping to develop some way of using the video’s popularity, possibly through related T-shirt sales, to assist Aurora victims or other causes related to the incident.

“I keep telling myself, I have all these sketch ideas that I want to kind of do, but I never follow through on them. Thank God, I did this time,” he said.

For the moment, it’s back to the sunglasses, but he says he’s always thinking of new projects, including more music videos, as well as short and feature-length films.

“I’m an actor-slash-glasses-manufacturer in LA. I’m hoping we can translate this into some more jobs,” he said.

Maybe, just maybe, the calls will soon pour in.