Unsung Treasures: Smooth Criminal

I'm going to say something blasphemous: "Thriller" was not the late Michael Jackson's best music Video. "Thriller" may have defined the music video but it did not, by any stretch of the imagination, become the greatest at the same time. I will give that honor to the "Smooth Criminal" video from Jackson's 1988 film, Moonwalker.

For those of you that don't remember, Moonwalker was pretty much nothing but a really long collection of music videos, some of them coming off slightly like ego trips but I digress. It also may have featured the King of Pop becoming a transformer. Seriously, he turns into a car and, later, a giant robot. I cannot make this stuff up. Anyway, at one point after turning into a car, Michael goes into a night club and the most awesome thing ever happens: Something so awesome that I just have to show you the video. Well, I was going to link to it anyway but describing it will just lower the value of it's awesomeness all that much more.



Yeah, that. That is awesome. The lighting. The costumes. The dancing. Sure, zombies dancing is kinda cool but it's nothing compared to 30's gangsters dancing and Michael doesn't get out a tommy gun at any point in "Thriller". That alone makes "Smooth Criminal" the clear winner. If anyone has any arguments for otherwise, let me know.

Unsung Treasures: Der Fuehrer's Face

It's Donald Duck's 25th birthday and what way to celebrate it but with one of the more... interesting... chapters in Donald's lifespan:

Der Fuehrer's Face

Also known as the Nazi Donald Duck cartoon, we have a great example of the WW2 propaganda film. A great cartoon, it also has a number of things I'll mention after the clip.



So, what we have here is a disturbing story of Donald being a member of the Nazi war machine and his eventual insanity. The story ends with it all being a dream but this is probably the most effective of all the propaganda cartoons. It's one thing to have Superman getting to "slap a jap." It's another for Donald Duck, a childhood image, living in a potential world of misery. Parts of it are funny but it also has a message. Bugs Bunny may fight Himler but Donald Duck suffered. May Donald's next 75 years go just as good.

Unsung Treasures: Orson's Farm

YouTube is a very useful tool for fandom. If you need to find anything, with a bit of a look, you can find it. In addition to videos of dogs just yelping, your childhood can be reclaimed, even if you don't know that it is there to find. Today, let's look at the show Orson's Farm aka U.S. Acres. The show was actually a segment on the series Garfield and Friends. When I was younger it was the time I would go and get some toast. Now that I'm younger, I realize that it was a bit more mature than I remember. We had arguments on existentalism, censorship, politics, and enviromentalism ("The sky is falling!" "I knew it! ALL this tampering with the O-Zone layer!")

This particular episode is known as Déjà Vu and it pretty much sums up what I was just saying.

Yeah, we got existentalism and doubts about the very substance of reality as seen in the antics of a cartoon pig and his pals. Add in a bit of thought on the Aristotilian Unities and we got a winner.

Our other example, Kiddie Korner, is all about censorship. It also starts out with a scene of the cast re-enacting Doctor Zhivago. Yeah, it kind of rocks like that.