The Decemberists Embroiled In Nasty Dork Feud With Stephen Colbert

Television satirist Stephen Colbert has accused Portland, Oregon lit-rockers The Decemberists of stealing his idea, and now he's enlisting "the Colbert nation" to help him exact revenge.

The late night host's velveteen slap to the death-obsessed book nerds' faces came on the November 29 edition of his Colbert Report news-ish opinion program. Colbert said The Decemberists are cribbing his "green screen challenge" and now wants his viewers to sabotage the band's campaign to let the public create music videos for them.

This is all due to The Decemberists' efforts to promote their tragic Shakespearian song, "O Valencia." The band have teamed with MTVU to execute their own green-screen challenge, and are asking people to build animated music videos around the musical performances they've taped. Whoever creates the best video will win an iMac. The band say they're "looking for something creative, consistent in detail and continuity in theme. Ideally the direction of your work connects with the band aesthetically."

Colbert's first green screen challenge was announced late this past summer. It featured footage of the bespectacled talking head swinging a light sabre, ducking, dodging and doing summersaults, to which fans then animated and added further footage, creating all-new clips.

Stung that The Decemberists would copy the idea, Colbert has declared his second green screen challenge. This one is to take the existing footage of Colbert slicing and dicing and inserting it into the "O, Valencia" video clip. A Colbert fan using the handle DarkD11 has already urged people at the YouTube home of the "O, Valencia" clip to "DO WHAT COLBERT WANTS. Colbert has ordered us to edit him into the video killing the Decemberists or something. DO IT and submit it..."

There should be no shortage of submissions, considering that bored advertising industry production department trolls and third-year new media students took up Colbert's first challenge with gusto, filling YouTube with epic confrontations between their hero and various Star Wars characters, mock iPod commercials and all sorts of other cartoonish misadventures. They may have technical difficulties this time around, though.

Ironically, for a challenge that's offering up a free iMac to the victor, and featuring a heavy focus on design and animation, attempts to preview The Decemberists' footage on the MTVU site could be difficult for many, as Apple users are met with the message, "mtvU Uber is not currently supported on the MacIntosh platform."