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March is Women's History Month!

Shut Out Of London Games, Video Artists Get Inventive

It's not easy to find video of the London 2012 Olympics on the Internet — even on YouTube. And that's inspiring people to "interpret" the Summer Games for themselves. For instance, you can see puppet shows, 8-bit video, and Taiwanese animation, all related to the Olympics... or, at least sort of related.

Here are some of my favorites — feel free to put yours into the comment section below:

The Wall Street Journal's "Homemade Highlight" of the Badminton Scandal, produced with its own puppets.

Taiwan's Next Media Animation previews the upcoming Japan vs. South Korea soccer match, replete with references to video games and cult kung-fu films.

A video called The 8-Bit Games gives a decidedly 1980s flavor to Olympic events, evoking the Nintendo and Sega graphics of that era. I spotted the video, by Flikli Productions, on Kotaku.

Most of the representations were created because of the very tight controls placed on Olympics-related content by organizers and broadcasters. NPR's Linda Holmes recently wrote about that situation, and a recent Torch post discussed how some folks are getting around it.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bill Chappell is a writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR's newsroom in Washington, D.C.