When you are watching a film or TV, there is always a small chance that Shaquille O'Neal will appear. While other sports stars settle for a failed Boca Raton, FL restaurant (I'm looking at your Wilt Chamberlin and Pete Rose), Shaq has a real estate firm, several rap albums, Google stock, 55 Five Guys franchises, and a reality TV show where he competes against other athletes in their own sport. Shaq likes to do a lot of things.
So I guess we should watch a random music video and see if Shaq happens to pop up. Let's pick something that has a really low chance of Shaq being in it, like, how about "Vanilla Twilight" by Owl City from 2010, directed by Steve Hoover.
This video takes place in winter in Pittsburgh (so far so good), and centers around a big cloud formation that Wikipedia tells me is a mammatus. It features a lot of random people looking up at this cloud formation from wherever they - ah shit it's Shaq! Come on!
What the hell is he doing in this music video? It's not like any of the other people looking up are famous or recognizable. Not that I want to limit the music that Shaq listens to, but he released multiple hip hop albums, for some reason I never put him and Owl City in the same thought until now. What is going on?
As the cloud swirls and the townsfolk observe it, Shaq seems to be the only one who almost immediately interprets it as some sort of deity, putting his arms up in the air and mouthing "take me with you".
Just so we're clear here - everyone in this video is looking at this cloud and saying "oh wow look at this cloud". Shaq is looking at this cloud and trying to get it to abduct him. This is not an apocolypse cloud either with cows flying around and debris and stuff - it's basically a nice, unique cloud on a winter day.
Naturally, we went looking for answers as to why Shaq is in this video. The most plausible explanation is offered up by Yahoo! Sports, which suspects that one of the reasons could be "when [Shaq] heard he got to go to an 'Owl City video shoot,' he thought he was going to an actual city inhabited by owls".
But actual reasons are hard to come by, save for this interview with Owl City frontman Adam Young jokingly saying he'd like to collaborate with Shaq. It's telling that when you google "shaq owl city" pretty much all you get are articles wondering why Shaq is in this video, so we're going to let the mystery lie where it sleeps. Shine on Shaq, shine on.
