Intertexuality within our ancillary tasks

What is intertexuality?

'Intertextuality is the complex interrelationship between a text and other texts taken as basic to the creation or interpretation of the text.'

Notable examples of intertextuality include animated programmes like The Simpson's, Futurama and Family Guy which are heavily dependant upon intertextual references as a source of humor.

An example of intertexuality is where in the OC, Seth is stuck on the roof wearing a spiderman mask and his girlfriend Summer is looking for him. She finds him outside in the rain and replicates the famous upside down in the rain spiderman kiss from the film 'Spiderman'. This is a direct reference to the film and is immediately recognisable.

Here is the real version taken from the film 'Spiderman':

Here is the OC's version:

Intertextuality within our ancillary tasks

So far the only intertextuality we have used in our production is our version of the 'Citizen Kane' table sequence. I thought the ancillary tasks would be a good way of incorporating ideas and elements from other media types such as films, TV shows and iconic people.

My first example is taken from the film 'Mean Girls' and the idea is to recreate the means girls famous poses. Here are pictures from the films photo shoot which most girls will be familiar with. If we were to recreate these photos I think that most teenage girls would understand the intertexuality but some people obviously do not know what means girls is and would therefore not really understand them. Also the bitchiness and powerfulness of the poses and characters do not represent the song 'Missing You' which is actually about love therefore the mean girls idea may be a bit inappropriate.

My next example is inspired by iconic people and the idea is to recreate the famous spice girls outfits they wore when performing at the Brit awards. Geri's union jack dress has become an iconic dress and would be easily recognisable to most people over 16. Although doing this shows no originality and wont make us look unique. It will also look (to people that wont recognise the outfit) like we are just wearing fancy dress and the costumes have no reference to the song or its lyrics.

My final example is from a television programme is to follow what The OC have done and not have an group picture with all three of us, but separate us and put us in little individual boxes. Although there are only 4 of us and 8 of them so the outcome would look a lot different. This idea will also make us look like less of a group and like individuals which we would like although we would want people to immediately know we were a girl group. The OC have used this box separation idea for most of the 4 seasons and is recognisable to fans of the OC but people that don't know what the OC is wouldn't notice the intertextuality.