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The “Dramatic Look“ or “Overly Dramatic Chipmunk“ is an old meme from 2007 that spread fast and persisted in early internet meme culture for quite a few years. In this short video clip, a Prairie Dog (not a Chipmunk) turns around to look at the camera in a seemingly overly dramatic way, while an audio clip from the score of the 1974 movie “Young Frankenstein” arranged by composer John Morris plays. The meme was originally uploaded to YouTube on June 6th 2007 by the user “magnets99”, and it has accumulated 42 million views as of December 2020 (Link: The origin of the clip is the 7th episode of a Japanese morning TV show called “Hello Morning!”, which had a segment called “Mini Moni Chicca”, where a group of J-Pop Idols presented cute animals. It quickly spread via early internet meme sites like College Humor, the Cheezburger network, BoinBoing, and even more mainstream outlets such as Comedy Central, which featured it in South Park! Of course it also quickly spawned a number of parodies and reenactments. The original copy of the video on YouTube has suffered a lot from video compression over the years, and it was never very high quality in the first place. So I decided to remake the entire video. However, I was sadly unable to find a copy of the original TV episode in good quality and without the TV Stations logos all over it. I decided to use a clip from the original Episode anyway, since the quality increase to 480p without the old YouTube compression was just too good to pass up. Together with a sound clip from the original movie soundtrack, the remake of the clip was done. To enhance the resulting Video I used two different AI applications. First I used DAINAPP 1.0 to increase the original 24fps frame rate of the footage to 60fps. Then I used Topaz Video Enhance A.I. 1.8 to scale up and enhance the video. The result is a video at 8K resolution, without compression artifacts and without most of the visual flickering and noise. The AI also detected and restored some detail and sharpened the image, mainly the fur around the prairie dog which looked more like a weird halo in the original footage (I’m actually surprised the AI detected that it is fur and knew what to do with it). A lot of work went into this very short clip, split between the research, remaking and AI rendering. So I hope you enjoy the result! And if you’re still reading this, you might as well leave a like and a suggestion for other old memes that I could restore.
