"The A-Team" sonnet

I’ve long been tickled by Shakespearean “versions” of things. There’s a Shakespearean version of Ghostbusters, “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars” (one book for every major film, I believe), and the book that I believe started it all, “Two Gentlemen of Lebowski” by Adam Bertocci. That last book tickled me so (especially the faux-scholarly textual notes) that I put on a free concert reading of it in graduate school, while showing cartoon storyboards drawn by a classmate.

One more addition to that list is the Internet trend of adapting the lyrics from well-known songs into sonnet form. “The Hokey-Pokey”, Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”, and many others (most by a single writer, published as “Pop Sonnets”). Some are quite clever.

I’ve never kept up terribly well with pop music, so I wondered what my sonnet might be. And then I hit on the perfect material: the introductory monologue to the best TV show of the 80s!

First, the original (to refresh your memory):

I was tickled by how many of the phrases in the original were already iambic, so the writing went quicker than anticipated:

The year was nineteen hundred seventy-two, 
A crack commando unit straight was sent 
To prison for a crime they did not do 
By military court: cruel punishment! 

So swiftly these courageous men did fly   
A maximum security stockade. 
In Angel City’s underground they lie, 
Lest back to jailor’s grasp they be conveyed. 

Still wanted by the government today, 
As mercenary soldiers they survive. 
They help but pow’rless victims seize the day, 
For evil deeds they never would contrive. 

If no one helps your problem when you pray, 
And you can find them, you might hire “Team A”. 

© Liam Castellan, 2020

(And a tip of the hat to Tino Brokaw, my grad school cubicle-mate, who helped me decide between a few options for the final couplet!)

The original plan was to superimpose the text over an image of the four actors from the show, or the A-Team van, and share the image around as a meme (like most of the other “Pop Sonnets”). But that wouldn’t capture the spirit of the original very well, so I decided to challenge myself. I realized this would be a great excuse to mess around a little with video editing (a skill that I’ve long known would be useful).

Here’s the result:

If you’re curious about the “making of”, keep reading:
After googling “best free video editing software windows”, I landed on a PC Magazine article that briefly mentioned pros and cons to several programs. I chose OpenShot, and found it fairly intuitive (though slightly less so when it comes to audio pieces).

I recorded the sonnet on Audacity, which I used years ago when I hosted a few episodes for Rep Radio, a theatre industry podcast in Philadelphia. I also needed to rip the audio from the original intro, which I did using VLC Media Player. All three programs free!

One cheat was that I needed to stretch some of the video over a longer period of time, as the sonnet took almost 10 seconds longer than the original text.

For years I’ve felt I’ve needed a “reel” that shows samples of some of my directing work, and I’m suddenly confident I might be able to do it myself. (Currently taking bets on how much longer that’ll take…)

Cheers,

Liam