Youtubing, Part 7

My yearly Youtube playlist is mostly made up of media ephemera that's difficult to categorize, and the only thing they really have in common is utilizing a strong musical element. Still, I think that they're worth recommending and writing about. This batch includes more tie-in music videos, advertising, and oddball musical numbers you probably forgot about.


Agony! - Whatever you want to say about the 2014 film version of Sondheim's "Into the Woods," directed by Rob Marshall, at least it gave us this priceless version of "Agony," with Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen hamming it up as the princes. Of all the cuts and omissions that were made to the second half of the adaptation, I've gotta say that the "Agony Reprise" being dropped hurt the most. I still hold out hope that they may have actually filmed it, or at least recorded a demo version, and it's just sitting in the back of the Disney vault waiting to be rediscovered in a decade or two.


Blue Danube - I love digging up the old Muppet sketches. This one aired on the 1967 CBS musical variety show "Our Place," hosted by Rowlf the Dog. Only ten episodes ever aired. The sketch would be repurposed for "The Muppet Show" a few years later with different music.


Shelling Sequence - One of the only things that I felt the "Ghost in the Shell" remake got right was the score. In addition to the work of Lorne Balfe and Clint Mansell, they also got the original film's composer, Kenji Kawaii, to update the main theme. I really wished that they'd used it with the opening "shelling" scene, which would have given us a proper live action third iteration of the sequence after the original hand-drawn one in the 1995 anime, and the CGI version in 2004's "Innocence." Fortunately, this is the internet, and everyone has editing software, so an enterprising fan gave us just that.


Reach - Once upon a time in 1983, Bill Paxton and Andrew Todd Rosenthal, formed a new wave musical band called Martini Ranch. For their 1988 single "Reach," James Cameron directed the music video. It includes cameos from Lance Henriksen, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein, Judge Reinhold, Brian Thompson, Adrian Pasdar, Bud Cort, and Kathryn Bigelow - several of the actors being from the cast of "Near Dark," which Bigelow was shooting at roughly the same time. This was made a few years before Cameron and Bigelow got married. Oh, and Judge Reinhold is credited as the whistler.


Danny Elfman in Concert - Danny Elfman went on tour with his "Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton" concerts back in 2015, resulting in a "Live From Lincoln Center" episode among other things. Elfman, who of course was the singing voice for Jack Skellignton, does a fantastic job onstage in the "Nightmare Before Christmas" segment. If I didn't have time constraints, I'd have just put in the whole thing. You know what? I don't have time constraints. Go watch the whole thing.


Inferno - Can you imagine the kind of pull you have when putting together this insane '70s rock parody video is possible? Where you can just call up David Hasselhoff and all these MCU stars, and ask them to sing nonsense in ridiculous costumes? Is that Michael Rooker as a lion? Written by James Gunn and Tyler Bates, this "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2" tie-in video is actually a spoof on Meco's disco "Star Wars Theme." Speaking of which, I should go and find THAT music video.


C is for Cookie - The folks over at Sesame Street have been producing some new content specifically for web viewers, including new animated lyric videos for several of their beloved songs. So, the new 2018 version has an animated Cookie Monster and friends getting up to hijinks, including Cookie chasing around a giant cookie. It's charming as heck, though I prefer the original, and I'm very relieved that they mostly kept the original audio.


The World is Not Enough - I always liked the title song of "The World is Not Enough" far more than the mediocre James Bond movie that it was attached to. I'd completely forgotten that it had an official music video, starring Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson as a gynoid infiltrator. The music video, no surprise, is also better than the movie.


Climax Opening Scene - And all you need to see of the latest Gaspar Noe movie is this sequence. Trust me.

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