We Just Wasted Five Minutes of Our Lives Watching This: A Telenovela Homework Assignment

Dec 5, 2013
9:19 AM

On paper, it sounded promising: submit a video for your Spanish class.

tacobell

Then we saw it (video below), and we suffered.

Here’s the scoop (via Gawker and Reddit): Julie Bryan submitted a film for her Spanish class, and got an A.

Good for the amateur filmmakers and their really laughably bad Spanish, but bad for the universe. The video obviously lacked, how say we say it, authenticity. Taco Bell. Ricky Ricardo. Painful. But we got to give them some credit for the dramatic.

We are so tired from all the same old trite themes out there when it comes to parodies. Listen, we know telenovelas are over the top and they are some of the worst representations Latin American culture, but it always feels uncomfortable seeing such parody done by non-Spanish speakers. Then when something like this goes viral (500,000 views)? It only gives fodder to the misperceptions: those Latinos and their Spanish-language soap operas!

We get it, but maybe we are just at a point where we need to do our own parody they way we feel we should do it.

Yeah, maybe that’s how you change the world.

And if we were grading this? A for filming technique. C for Spanish. F for Taco Bell.