The Best In Video Mixtapes: TV Carnage's Let's Work It Out!

​If you're me, you're a proud Gen-X'er in your late thirties with a Boomer-strength nostalgia for VHS and the video stores you once worked at. Since then you've become a high-def snob who doesn't like to watch anything below 720p if you can help it. Unless, of course, it's a collage of re-edited VHS footage, in which case you are so there.

It's why I love The Found Footage Festival, and they turned me on to TV Carnage and their series of VHS mixtapes. (They're only available on DVD, but, y'know, pick pick.)

In the early '90s, the Video Zone in Fresno had a shelf of about forty exercise videos featuring celebrities and pseudo-celebrities, and what feels like every one of those videos -- and dozens of others, along with choice clips from movies and news shows and whatever else fits -- are remixed by TV Carnage in what I consider to be the current pinnacle of the form, Let's Work It Out!.

Considering that it clocks in at 73 minutes, it's staggering how much time and effort went into making something as dense-in-a-good-way as Let's Work It Out!. Heck, I'm proud enough when I can just find a perfect minute or two, cut it out, and upload it to YouTube. Like this clip, in which Estelle Getty, O.J. Simpson, Raquel Welch and Bubba Smith (RIP) remind you to breathe:

O.J. Simpson and Estelle Getty out of context are never not funny to me, so here they are again on the subject of alcohol:

And there's so much more in both this and the rest of TV Carnage's work. Get ready to have your fat burned, your core strengthened, and your mind blown.

Sherilyn Connelly is a San Francisco-based writer. She also curates and hosts Bad Movie Night at The Dark Room, every Sunday at 8pm.

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