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You Knew He Would Comment On Last Night’s Game

Yeah, these Downfall clips are getting old, but we all wanted to know what the internet’s most popular commentator had to say about the hockey game last night.

Whole books could be written on the cultural meaning of the Downfall meme. The movie was supposed to show that Hitler is not some kind of mythological figure, and it’s been used by North American video-makers to turn Hitler into a kind of new-minted mythological figure — Hitler the pop-culture critic. Of course this meme is not really about Hitler; it’s about our own tendency to over-react and take pop culture and sports way too seriously. But it’s also part of a tendency to turn Hitler’s mannerisms and pop-culture portrayals into something separate and different from the real person. The Hitler from Inglourious Basterds, who is based almost entirely on previous pop-culture portrayals of Hitler and gets a more satisfying retribution than he did in real life, is the Hitler for the current generation. Or maybe it’s this Hitler:

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