Wednesday, November 09, 2011

MA-26 - Break -Ins from Beyond

Along with the rising of mass media and a united pop culture in the twentieth century came a realization that folks might have shared the same experience as you, even if they hadn’t been WITH YOU.  In other words, two people might have seen the same silent movie, even though they lived in far-apart towns.  Hence,  “So’s your old man!” came to mean, “Shut up” or “I disagree with you,” by common reference to the WC Fields 1926 silent movie of the same title.

Similarly, Veronica Lake’s hair-over-one-eye look may have been sultry and attractive, even when emulated by thousands of women in the 1940s, but it also was dangerous when those same women were working in war plants during WWII and got their loose, sultry tresses caught in machinery, leading to injury and death.  Here’s a Youtube video concerning this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgpvKXLTwr8

When recorded music reached this same plateau (or valley, take your pick), then folks could start referring to hit records with the assurance that the listener would understand the reference.  That’s the whole idea behind sound-alike “cover” versions of pop tunes.  If the imitation sounded enough like the original, then the cover version could score some sales, riding on the coattails of the original hit record.

Then came along people with twisted senses of humor, like me.  They realized that this same familiarity with hit records meant that various catch-phrases could be cut out from the recording and reassembled, much like a newspaper-ad ransom note.

And thus the “break-in” record was born.  Ordinarily, such an assemblage would have the format of a narrator or an interview giving a leading statement that could then be “replied to” by a one-or-two-second segment from a song that was current enough that the hoped-for listener would recognize the clip, and get the joke – meanwhile marveling at the assembler’s creativeness, and eventually buying the break-in record.

Here’s my own assemblage of a bunch of these, as they relate to outer space and little green men, and the like.  Not all are break-ins, there are some more straight songs.

Here are the tracks:
1 -        Marty on the Planet Mars Part 1         Martty 1954
2 -        Marty on the Planet Mars Part 2         Martty 1954
3 -        Santa and the Satellite Part 1  Buchanan and Goodman        1957
4 -        Santa and the Satellite Part 2  Buchanan and Goodman        1957
5 -        Destination Love        Jan Davis         1958
6 -        The Outer Space Looters Part 1          The Mad Martians       1958
7 -        The Outer Space Looters Part 2          The Mad Martians       1958
8 -        Flying Saucer The 3rd Buchanan and Goodman        1959
9 -        Blast Off!        Jimmie Haskell and His Orchestra      1959
10 -      Comic Strip Rock N Roll        Robert Ashley 1959
11 -      Space Ship      Dickie Goodman         1960
12 -      Santa and the Touchables       Dickie Goodman         1961
13 -      Moon Gas       Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo 1963
14 -      The Flying Saucer       Chickenman      1966
15 -      Luna Trip        Dickie Goodman         1969
16 -      London, London         Ceatano Veloso           1971
17 -      Spaceship        Spontaneous Combustion         1973
18 -      Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft     Klaatu 1976
19 -      Hey ET            Dicklie Goodman        1982
20 -      The Martian Boogie    Brownsville Station    1977
21 -      The Ballad of William Robinson        Bill Mumy       1997
22 -      Return of the Flying Saucer    Jon Goodman  1997
23 -      I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship          David Bowie      2002
24 -      UFO    Darryl Rhoades           2005
25 -      le flying saucer hat      Chairlift           2008
26 -      Flying Saucers Breakfast in Fur          2009

And here is the link:   http://www.megaupload.com/?d=X17GB074

As John Landis likes to say, SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY!
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© by Mark Alfred