Re: Somewhat Obscure 80's Band Overdrive
I was watching TV (as usual), and I ran across an interesting little short on the Cartoon Network.
It was a music video, of sorts, about the main characters in the animated series "Dexter's Laboratory", Dexter and Didi.
The animation was very cool, sort of a spoof on classic Japanese animation along the lines of "Astro Boy". Very clever. Oh, and the song was okay, too, by some indy-sounding band with nasal voices.
Then the credits rolled. The band? They Might Be Giants.
*smak* Arrgh! I can't believe I missed that! My TMBG-dar used to be flawless! But the song just wasn't up to their standards.
Those poor guys are suffering from overwork, combined with ubiquity. They seem to be going the Danny Elfman route: perform with your band (Oingo Boingo), but do every TV, commercial, or movie soundtrack that comes down the pike in order to keep up payments on the summer place in the Catskills. Eventually, Elfman stopped performing altoghether and became the red-headed Phantom of the Opera of movie and TV soundtracks. The next time we'll see him, he'll be accepting an Oscar (tm) al la Randy Newman, yet another pop star who disappeared into soundtrack nirvana.
(You remember Randy Newman: "Piña Colada", "Short People", "I Love LA". That guy.)
(Oingo Boingo's big hit was "Dead Man's Party", but Elfman also did the big hit "Gratitude" solo.)
(That Oingo Boingo page is the work of my friend Nicole's husband, Dan. We were huge fans in high school.)
Speaking of opening the pop vaults, even Devo did a song for Cartoon Network. I love Devo (another 80's band doing soundtracks for everything these days). They are another band that never lost sight of their artistic vision, no matter how weird that vision was.
(Devo: "Whip it", "Jocko Homo", "Beautiful World" - which was in a Target commercial - "It's a beautiful world we live in, a sweet romantic place...")
They wore the hats in the video, too.
11:54:55 AM 
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