Weekend Fun: AIB asks Bollywood to ‘lighten up’ with a music video

Comedy Group All India Bakchod has created a song targeted at the Bollywood fraternity. Through the song, the group is making a plea to the film industry in Mumbai, to be more accepting towards parodies and spoofs.

The music video was triggered by refusal of the producers of Dhoom 3, Yash Raj Films, to allow the group to create an ‘honest trailer’ using movies from the Dhoom franchise and their trailers.

 

Member of the group, Tanmay Bhat, elaborated on the creation of the song, in conversation with Campaign India.

 

"Youtube has a very strict copyright policy. So if Yash Raj Films (YRF) wanted to, they could've taken our video down by claiming copyright. Every channel has three strikes on YouTube. Having a video taken down is a strike. And every strike freeezes your privileges as a YouTube partner for six months (some features go missing, in view streaming ads go away etc). This is something we didn't want to do given that we've spent four months on the channel, nurturing it to this position," he explained. 

 

The group offered YRF the option of monetising the videos in which their copyrighted content would be used. They were also given the option of changing the jokes if they thought it was ‘below the belt’, said the popular stand-up comedian.

 

“They refused. We decided to do this song because of that. Because we didn't want to get into trouble with YouTube. At the same time we also wanted to send out a message. Because this isn't about Yashraj. I know the folks at Yashraj personally and they're really nice people. They even reacted to the video really well. Which was such a nice thing to see. The idea was to make a point about Bollywood and how they need to lighten up," surmised Bhat. 

 

Commenting on the video through its YouTube channel, YRF, said, "Cool stuff! Love the way they have taken our pants off! Unfortunately we couldn’t allow them to use the spoof that they are upset about because it went into messing around with the personal space of the actors which was not cool. Enjoy! And keep it coming!"