How to Kill a Mockingbird

Submission 20,845

Part of a series on Pirates vs. Ninjas. [View Related Entries]

About

How to Kill a Mockingbird is a flash animation parody of Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The short film is presented as a child's book report on the novel, but quickly diverts from the actual plot, into a battle between Pirates vs. Ninjas , making it obvious the child never finished the book. It is one of the web's earliest viral videos.

Origin

"How to Kill a Mockingbird" was created by two Stanford undergraduates, Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez. The video was originally posted to Scodary's now defunct Stanford student page^[1] on November 13th, 2014.The following day, Scodary and Benitez registered their own website, AwesomeFunny.com,^[4] where they linked back to the Stanford page.

Spread

The video was uploaded to AlbinoBlackSheep^[10] on February 12th, 2009, and on Vimeo^[12] on October 6th, 2009. On June 15th, 2009, TVTropes added an entry for "How to Kill a Mocking Bird," describing it as:

"a 12 minute-long Flash movie made by Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez. It centers on a book report of To Kill a Mockingbird made by a little boy who didn't read the entire book, leading to Crazy Awesome results."

The video was first uploaded to YouTube by YouTuber mockingbirdv^[14] on November 7th, 2010. As of July 2014, the video has gained over 61,000 views.

Search Interest

Searches for "how to kill a mockingbird" follow a cyclical pattern, with peaks during the American school year and lows during the summer. However, it is clear that there is a huge spike in searches for the video in late 2004 and early 2005, when the animation was released.