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Screengrab: Disney via Botston/Twitter

Brilliant Twitter bot sings like Gaston from ‘Beauty and the Beast’

No one goofs like Bot-ston, no one spoofs like Bot-ston, no one spits algorithmical truths like Bot-ston.

 

Jay Hathaway

Internet Culture

Posted on Apr 20, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 10:11 pm CDT

Gaston—Beauty and the Beast‘s unidimensional, studly villain with incredible eyebrow game—is a favorite target of Internet parody. I mean, the guy’s just so… vanilla. Plus, he comes with a boastful musical number that provides an ideal format for mockery. 

https://twitter.com/NatalieZed/status/692829420537536513

That’s a particularly witty example, but the general formula is so easy that a Twitterbot could get the hang of it. And, in fact, one very good bot has. 

Meet Bot-ston, created by coder and professional glaciologist(!) Martin O’Leary

“In June 2015 I had the Gaston song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast stuck in my head for about a week. To exorcise it, I made this bot, which generates random versions of the chorus.” 

Bot-ston finds rhymes to fit the schema of the song and just recently gained the ability to sing them (on-key!) in a text-to-speech synth voice

It will not—absolutely not—help to get the chorus of “Gaston” out of your head. If anything, it will only lodge it there more firmly. 

Bot-ston, you are positively primeval. 

♫ No-one jots like Bot-ston / Tweets bon mots like Bot-ston / In a botting match, nobody bots like Bot-ston. ♫

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*First Published: Apr 20, 2016, 3:47 pm CDT