Oddly, none of them are even slightly lemony. Or demonic, in fact.

Back in early 2006, a Flash video appeared online, telling the story of an epic battle between most of the major characters in popular culture from the last few decades. That video was called The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (quite a lot of violence - not suitable for those squeamish about cartoon blood and gore). Not surprisingly, given the amount of sheer awesome contained in this video, it swept across the Internet, and was seen by a fairly ridiculously huge number of people (2.5 million on Weebl's Stuff alone, and 9.3 million on Newgrounds so far).

The attention that The Ultimate Showdown received was entirely warranted - it's a great movie. What a lot of people tend to forget, though, is the large body of other work that the song's composer and performer has produced. This person (yes, it was just one person doing the whole thing) is Neil Cicierega, also known as Trapezoid, or more famously as Lemon Demon. He currently has 3 CDs out, and if his CD shop was based in the UK I'd be seriously considering buying at least one. As it is, for the purposes of this post I'm going to have to rely on the free material that he's made available.

(Before looking at what Cicierega's been working on, it's worth noting that he's been way ahead of the curve when it comes to sensible music distribution - he's using CDFreedom, which makes CDs available as MP3 downloads with no copy-protection at all, and is trusting his customers not to go pirating them. And given that level of trust, I very much doubt that many people are doing so. It seems that the major labels are finally cottoning on to the fact that this is a good idea, too, which only took...ooh, quite a number of years. But I digress.)

Cicierega's free music (and may I note at this point how flippin' difficult the name Cicierega is to type) is available to download off his site. I have 4 of his tracks in my music library (one of which is Ultimate Showdown) and they're all funny, whimsical, well produced and cleverly written. Ode To Crayola is one of them - a celebration of colourful crayons, in case you hadn't guessed. Cicierega seems to have the gift of writing about pretty much nothing at all and making it into a very entertaining song. Indeed, one of his songs - Word Disassociation - literally consists of almost nothing but unconnected words strung into a long line.

Talking about Word Disassociation leads us into the real gems in the Lemon Demon music collection - his music videos. The Google Video for WD can be found here; if you haven't seen it yet, do take a minute to do so, as it's very cleverly shot and will leave you with a smile on your face. There's several other live-action videos around, including a fanmade one of the song Marketland, but possibly even better are the Flash animations by Too Much Spare Time Animation, also known as Andrew Kepple. His music videos include When Robots Attack, a funny and thoughtful description of what would happen if the peaceful mechanical devices we all know and love suddenly rose up and crushed us all (something we've all wondered from time to time, I have no doubt), and Geeks In Love, the subject of which you can probably guess! There's several others, but the one I would point you to above all others is the Halloween-themed Bad Idea.

Obviously, because of the Halloween theme, this movie might not be suitable for everyone - it does feature the living dead, after all, and it gets a bit graphic. If you've got the stomach for it, though, it's brilliant. The animation is superb, a good step up from the earlier I've Got Some Falling To Do (which is itself a great piece of work). The artwork in general is likewise impressive, blending a number of different visual styles very effectively, and it's held together by the wonderful lyrics with their understatement of the year, "Maybe this was a bad idea..." I think the reason why it's so successful at what it does is that both Kepple and Cicierega have exactly the same aims in mind. The song's ending shows clearly that they worked very closely in order to make the song and video a single unit, rather than one obviously coming first, and I suspect that a similar process informed Ultimate Showdown. This is, in fact, an excellent example of how the Internet sometimes leads to entirely new forms of entertainment, taking previous concepts and turning them into something that is highly original and much better than either on its own could have been.

And if you're looking for even more novel combinations of previously-encountered entertainment genres, you can't do better than Potter Puppet Pals.

Once again...not my video, so not under my CC licence.