That drunk Russian space pig thing

Click the image for the full photo montage.

I first encoun­te­red this last year on WFMU’s blog, and des­pite being curious of its ori­gins, the inter­net has trai­ned me to accept con­tent without con­text. Funny pic­tu­res, drunk pig, pass it on. Neither the WFMU post, nor the blog they got it from even ask where this came from. But who cares — find it, blog about it, Digg it, make a YTMND about it, a You­Tube spi­noff, and move on to the next meme.

But there’s something clearly artis­tic about these ima­ges. They’re too per­fect. And they depict such a cari­ca­tu­red past that you sus­pect they may have been taken recently. And, as noted in the com­ments that I didn’t bother to read until today, they were.

They’re stills from a 2005 Rus­sian moc­ku­men­tary called Pervye na lune, or First on the Moon, which actually looks good, its pre­mise approaching what you might have expec­ted if you spe­cu­la­ted enough about the intent of those pho­tos. From the film’s offi­cial site, as trans­la­ted by Goo­gle:

You can argue long, the Ame­ri­cans were on the Moon or not, but there are facts that prove con­vin­cingly : Soviet scien­tists were able to run the first airc­raft into space as early as March 1938. Infor­ma­tion more than con­vin­cing, and at this time Rus­sian cos­mo­nauts ahead of the Americans …

It’s not on Net­flix yet, but I hear it’s on Kara­garga, the invite-only avant-garde film torrent trac­ker, which means it may soon make it to art torrents or gpod. There are also seve­ral copies on eBay, but I can’t be sure they have sub­tit­les, or are even com­pa­ti­ble with Ame­ri­can DVD players.

Read more about it:

• Wiki­pe­dia
• IMDb
• Первые на Луне
• european-films.net
• Megan Case
• The Acci­den­tal Russophile