IT WAS a hit film showing Hitler in the Berlin bunker in the last days of the Third Reich as his terrified generals arrived with news of another crushing defeat.

But in this version, which is part of the latest craze to sweep the internet, the Führer’s outburst is triggered not by military disasters but by a football result.

He erupts with rage when he hears that Arsenal have beaten his beloved Tottenham Hotspur 3-1. “Everyone associated with the club is a total moron,” Hitler shouts in German, or so the subtitles would have you believe. “I might as well go [and] f****** support Chelsea.”

Welcome to the weird world of the “mash-up”, in which “guerrilla” film-makers take familiar movies, pop videos and computer games and edit, dub or add subtitles to them to create versions with radically different and often hilarious meanings.

The video of Hitler as a deranged football fan is attracting 1,000 hits an hour and is just one of a number of skits on the award-winning film Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler.

The most popular of the genre has attracted 1.7m hits; it was posted in June by Chris Bowley, 19, from Nottingham, a computer student at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

In Bowley’s version, Hitler flips when he discovers that Microsoft has cancelled his Xbox games console account. He screams at his generals when they suggest he might play with a Nintendo Wii instead.

“Imagine the news!” he screams. “Hitler gives up on the war and decides to play with his Wii.” Last week it was being watched by 10,000 new people a day.

Bowley said: “The idea just came to me early one morning as I was about to go to sleep. So I made the video around 3am. It took me about an hour and then I uploaded it. By morning the video had started to roll. I expected to get 500 views.”

He is now working on a mash-up of the film version of Raymond Briggs’s book The Snowman.

The film Downfall was first hijacked early this year by a hacker calling himself Smokey McPot. He added subtitles to show Hitler losing his temper when his car is lost and a general suggests he drive an American-built Mustang instead.

An Arsenal fan calling himself Goonerz reworked the same clip to mark his team’s victory over Tottenham in September.

To some critics, mash-ups are as exciting as punk rock 30 years ago, or the subversive work of film-makers such as Quentin Tarantino. Some argue that the best mashers could become as celebrated as Banksy, the graffiti artist.

However, mash-ups pose a problem for internet service providers because they often infringe both the copyright and the artistic integrity of the source material. But they are so popular that legitimate business is now embracing them.

A senior Google executive showed a music mash-up of Shakira, the Colombian singer, at a London business conference in which the official video for her hit song Hips Don’t Lie had been substituted by a spoof clip. Nikesh Arora, vice-president of European operations for Google, said that while only a few hundred people had watched the official video on YouTube – the doit-yourself video site that Google bought last year – 11.7m had viewed the spoof.

“Clearly there is something interesting happening out there,” Arora said. “People want to express themselves.”

Last week Channel 4 launched a competition for people to take feeds from its FilmFour network and produce their own versions.

View the Arsenal/Hitler mash-up clip
Warning: this clip contains offensive language

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