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