The Boy Who Cried Wolf

The video was created by a 19-year-old violin performance major at the University of Washington named Andrew Foster, who convinced his friends to help him make costumes and sets.

Foster told Advocate magazine he wasn’t even a fan of Shakira when he came up with the idea of spoofing the clip and posting it on YouTube.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is YouTube’s reaction: Despite the fact that the video is nearly identical to the singer’s – albeit with lower production values and a male star – they deemed it “inappropriate” and placed it in the restricted adult content section of the site.

Unfortunately for YouTube, the clip had already been noticed and got reposted everywhere from Advocate to Facebook, and has now become an Internet sensation.

Foster told Advocate he and his friends thought Shakira’s video was “ridiculous and disturbing and different than anything we’d seen before” and his first thought was, “I have to do a parody of it. I have to do my own version.”

As for all of those places Foster’s clip got reposted, well I’ll let him explain.

“YouTube has this feature where you can see where all you videos are being embedded and linked from,” he told Advocate. “At first, it was linked mainly by Facebook – it was mostly friends spreading it to friends. That was back when it was between 10,000 and 20,000 views.

“It got picked up by Manhunt [laughs] … I think that was the first blog that picked it up. And then I got a huge number of views from that. There have been some gay porn blogs that picked it up, which has been really funny to see.”

No offense Andrew, but – did you expect anything less?

So how does he feel about being tagged “inappropriate”? Puzzled.

“That was completely unexpected,” he explained to the magazine. “I was kind of dismayed because this means that it gets buried in the search results when people look up ‘He Wolf,’ and people who just copy my video and repost it online are showing up ahead of me just because theirs haven’t been flagged.”

Foster also said he’d like YouTube to reconsider their decision and feels it shows a double standard “since mine copies Shakira’s so closely.”

And team Shakira’s feelings about the parody? Well, they haven’t made YouTube take it down yet. So…

So what do you think? Is YouTube being unfair? Should they remove the flag from Foster’s video?

Here’s the original video for “She Wolf.”

And here’s Andrew Foster’s “He Wolf.”

Read Advocate magazine’s complete interview with Foster here. (BTW, kudos Advocate on a killer title for your piece.)