September 24, 2009

Back in the mid-80s, when Eddie Murphy was huge, the movie The Golden Child came out. When it was first on video (yes...VHS), we used to watch it all the time. There was this hilarious scene in Nepal where Eddie Murphy puts on this big speech in front of these military guards, we called it the "Viva Nepal scene". There is this one guard who is making the most ridiculous face (see above) as he's smiling, and my friends and I would always crack up every time we saw it. I mean, 'have-to-stop-the-movie-we're-laughing-so hard-we're-crying' type of laughter. Now, we were 13 years old at the time, so it was understandable.

(I'm not going to post the video on here, but you can watch it at this link. Forgive the Scandinavian subtitles, but it's all I could find. The key moment comes between 1:10 and 1:20)

Fast forward 23 years later to 2009, and any time in the past that I would reference that scene, nobody would know what the hell I was talking about, so I was wondering if it was just my childhood friends and I who thought it was funny. Then a few weeks ago, my friend Matt in Vancouver said something about The Golden Child, and I took a chance and threw out a "Viva Nepal!"...and he lost it! Finally, I found someone who could relate!

So we both tried to find screen captures from that scene, so we could use it somehow, but there was nothing to be found. I kind of forgot about it until a couple of days ago, a package arrived for me at work, and it was from Matt. I opened it up, and inside was a white T-Shirt with this on the front:
I let out an extremely loud laugh that had to be explained to my co-workers in adjoining offices. What a fantastic T-shirt! I called Matt and asked him how on earth he made it. He told me that he downloaded the movie, got a screen capture from that scene (which you see at the top of this post), and then got it made from a place where you can Obama-cize an image. How awesome is that?

Huge kudos to Matt for a great surprise, and a great gift.

Viva Nepal!