On April Fool’s Day, Twitter personality Richard Lawson successfully RickRolled many of us with the video we are about to discuss.
It is a video of a very energetic young man in a series of bright tops doing a mashup of the recent pop hit “Bang Bang” with the significantly less recent Nancy Sinatra classic “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”. During the portions of the video when he is singing Nancy Sinatra, he wears a more sombre black tank top to emphasize the seriousness of said song.
I have watched it…eighty times since Friday? My mother came to visit and I played it for her while we were still in the airport. I have played it for my cousins, and for my children. I sent it to Mallory and she immediately called me and we discussed it for twenty minutes. “I wish someone would tell me how to feel about this video,” she said. “I wish I could read a 20k word oral history of this video,” I responded.
It is sublime, it is ridiculous. The gentleman in question is Blake McIver Ewing, who you may remember from Full House and as Waldo from the 1994 film The Little Rascals.
This is a man living his best life. This is a man who is comfortable with himself. This is a man who does not shy away from using hand gestures.
bang
This is everything I needed. I was getting angry reading that horrible Talese article where he participates in voyeurism for the sake of the story but this makes it all better.
I bloody love this.
You cannot convince me that this video wasn’t made in 1994 and then only recently uploaded. OK. Wait. Ariana Grande might not’ve been born in 1994. Crap. The hair, though! The tight v-necks!
Is this what Renaissance-era time travelers (who have travelled forward to our time) feel when they go to Ren Faires? Like a fair amount of it makes sense for their time, but so much is out of place. I’m coming to like this feeling! It’s a completely interesting feeling!
Ariana was born in 1993.
i mean ted cruz is definitely the zodiac killer and he was born in 1970 so it could very possibly be another case of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff
I did NOT recognize him from Little Rascals but now that I have googled it I am delighted
I think my coworkers might be really confused about why I’m smiling like a lunatic in our dead-silent open office right now.
(dead silent because we have a board conference call going on and some folks are on that call)
This is pretty terrific. It could only be better if the my baby shot me down part was the Sonny and Cher version. I am glad that I got to choose to watch it today and it did not rickroll me on friday.
BLASPHEMY to choose S&C over Nancy.
see below. Sonny wrote the damn song.
hm.
Yeah.
Nope.
This is so hypnotic.
Wish I felt like this:
but really I feel like this:
Darla, you made the wrong choice, girl.
DEREK
I never would have predicted that this man’s life trajectory/face would have diverged so completely from that of Macaulay Culkin.
I love 99% of genderswapped covers and Bang Bang more than most things, so bless you, Nicole.
This made me grin.
I needed a grin today.
He is also on the shouldn’t-be-hilarious-but-is-anyway Bravo show “The People’s Couch.” It is the only show on TV that makes me laugh out loud.
CHER was the artist who originally sang and released “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”. Sonny Bono wrote it.
Sure, Nancy Sinatra covered it, but that’s a damn Cher song.
YES! IT IS A CHER SONG! It was written by Sonny Bono for Cher to sing first and is a classic, classic Cher song from 1966. She owned that song! But apparently Nancy Sinatra did a cover, also in 1966, that very few people noticed as the Cher song was so prevalent at the time, and that cover was used in the opening “shots” (heh, heh) of Kill Bill Volume 1, so the Nancy Sinatra reference is more recent in the minds of younger people, and for younger people, things that happened before they were born/before the internet was invented, just didn’t happen. 🙁 So now Sinatra gets the nod.
I see this phenomenon all the time on teh internets! Can’t take a minute to check Wikipedia, I guess.
CHER was the artist who originally sang and released "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)". Sonny Bono wrote it.
Sure, Nancy Sinatra covered it, but that's a damn Cher song.
Have you ever been sad that someone *wasn’t* a drag queen? It’s a new feeling for me too.
Mr D. Tried watching it and had to stop because of the lip movements. It is very uncanny valley
I would be more impressed if this had been a 3 way mash-up with “bang bang” by will.i.am included. Someone make THAT real. I’m willing to pay.
He’s like a reverse Morrissey! I love it!
This is exactly what I needed to justify not working on a Tuesday morning.
I am crying right no I was just cackling so hard. The part that really gets me is the last bang