Fans of Fox musical series pay homage with own videos

"Glee," Fox's sharp and subversive musical comedy series, is averaging a respectable 8.6 million viewers a week. And apparently they are going online to champion and celebrate the show, which is turning out to be more viral than H1N1.

"Glee" may rank 42nd in the Nielsen ratings, but it's a phenomenon on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. "We monitored Twitter feeds, and 'Glee' is absolutely crushing the competition," says Chris Albrecht, co-editor of NewTeeVee.com, a Web site devoted to online video. "Of all TV shows, it's the one people Twitter about the most."

Fans of the series -- imagine "High School Musical" with a wicked sense of humor -- call themselves Gleeks. They have an unusual way of expressing their devotion: taping do-it-yourself copycat videos of the show's rousing musical numbers, then posting them on YouTube or on their home pages.

The spontaneous explosion of tribute videos was the first indication to the makers of "Glee," which airs at 9 p.m. Wednesdays on Fox, that their show was hitting a sweet spot with viewers.

"Right after we aired the pilot in May, people started posting their own versions of our songs online," says Dante Di Loreto, executive producer. "It was so exciting to see because we knew then that we had touched a chord.

"Believe me, I've seen a lot of different versions of our songs," Di Loreto says of the online reproductions. "No matter how crazy they get, it's still flattering."

There are at-home videos featuring puppets, Disney cartoon characters, even a live leaf bug grooving to the show's cover of "Gold Digger."

Remember the sparkly rendition of Burt Bacharach's "I Say a Little Prayer" delivered by three lissome cheerleaders on one episode? Imagine it painstakingly reenacted by three bearded men in baby Ts. "People say, 'You should do it in drag,'" says Jason Whipple, who lip-syncs the lead. "I say, 'We ARE doing it in drag! It's boy drag.' "

Whipple, who recently moved to San Francisco from Vermont, made the clip as a lark in his apartment with two friends and a digital camera. They dubbed their hirsute trio the Full Silkwood, after a typically audacious punch line from the show.

His little jape has turned Whipple into a minor celebrity. "I was walking with a friend of mine to a coffee shop," he says. "A couple of people stopped us. 'You're the guy from the video!' My friend was like, 'You just moved here a month ago. How does everyone know you?' "

One of the more ambitious tribute videos is a shot-for-shot restaging of the pilot's showstopper, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." Filmmaker Wes Kim recruited six friends for the reenactment, shot in downtown Seattle. Because he didn't have a portable device to play back the episode, Kim had to refresh his memory of the source material by different means.

"Everyone had iPhones and smart phones," he says. "So for specifics, we would watch bits of it on the spot."

Most Gleeks avoid the big production numbers and their complex choreography, preferring to imitate the more manageable songs performed by trios or duos.

The vast majority of these knockoffs seem to be shot in bedrooms or finished basements using webcams. They look like outtakes from a sleepover party. The jerky and murky results often are embarrassingly amateurish.

So why do people upload them to the Web for all the world to see?

Say hello to the "American Idol" generation. Everyone is a star waiting to happen. Just add microphone.

"A lot of the literature about contemporary youth in my discipline talks about narcissism," says Alexander Riley, associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University. "This is a generation that is driven in the direction of obsessive concern for self. It's a narcissism with a powerful degree of requiring the approval of others."

Uploading videos, says Riley, "has a lot to do with the role celebrity plays in a society like ours. It's increasingly apparent that many celebrities are made by a particular process. There's the thought, 'If they can be a celebrity, I can, too.' "