Last night's YouTube Music Awards were, uh, interesting. While hosts Reggie Watts and Jason Schwartzman were pretty terrible, the live music videos were a lot of fun, and for that we can thank the show's creative director, Spike Jonze. Hopefully he had nothing to do with the cake thing, though.
Over the last few years we've only had a handful of Spike Jonze music videos, so last night it was great to see him back in action, albeit in a very different setting. That got us thinking about Jozne's videography, so today on Music Video Relapse we're watching one of our favorites, "Wonderboy" (2001) by Tenacious D.
"Wonderboy" is one of those songs that seems to write its own music video. It tells the story of the titular Wonderboy and his arch nemesis, Young Nasty Man who join forces to do - something. It's actually not that clear - like many of Tenacious D's songs, it's filled with fragments here and there but no coherent storyline. Even so, it has some vivid imagery like killing a yak from 200 yards away - with mind bullets. Because of stuff like this, I always pictured Wonderboy as a sort of super hero along the lines of Superman.
So Jonze had a challenge with the Wonderboy video - the song has a few fragments of imagery with very little in the way of connective material to work with. In the end, he decided to go with depicting Wonderboy and Young Nasty Man as two characters in a Lord of the Rings-style story about a quest up a snowy mountain.
And that's pretty much it - nothing really much happens in this video except for the both of them climbing up a mountain and then Wonderboy (Jack Black) fighting an unseen monster and being killed by his own sword. It's a beautiful video (unfortunately not available in HD), and that is sort of the point of the whole thing. It looks a lot like the source material its mimicking, and its fun to watch Jack Black play both of their characters completely straight with no trace of irony.
This video coud have easily been a pretty forgettable comedy video, but instead chose to go way off in the direction of the cinematic. It isn't as memorable as their most popular video "Tribute", but its a great piece that reminds us that Tenacious D was always about mixing comedy with other elements - like adventure films.
