styx – The Red Pen of Doom

Yes, it’s a tragedy, and yes, it’s sillypants to abandon the Best Business Model Ever: musicians and studios sent you free content (music videos) that you play all day and night while MONEY ROLLS IN from advertising. RIP to MTV, 1981-2025.

It’s a license to print money. But no, highly paid executives with MBA’s from Ivy League schools decided it was smarter to spend money on lame content (reality shows), as if every other TV channel didn’t also have lame reality shows.

So: as a public service, I’ll be playing music videos here until I run out of videos or years. First up: 1981.

James Corden didn’t forget the funny here. He fully committed: great cinematography, great writing and pacing. The whole package.

That’s the secret to comedy: you have to close your eyes and step off the top of a ten-story building. A little hop off the curb doesn’t do it. Comedy works through extremes.

Stephen Colbert did something similar with his Stephenade bit.

Now, Colbert is a genius, among the best in the world at monologues and interviews. Love him. But this was mildly amusing compared to Corden’s masterpiece.

Why?

Colbert did a sort of SNL-skit version of the idea: let’s take a baseball bat and smash things in slow motion. It was a quick, one-trick thing, and just like a SNL skit, taking it longer wouldn’t work.

Corden went big. You can tell they put time and effort into it. You or I could’ve grabbed a bat and smashed things like Colbert.

Jimmy Fallon fully committed, too, with his frame-by-frame version of Too Much Time on My Hands by Styx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFP3uD_gXsQ

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Here’s the original. I hit play on both and with only a little fiddling with pause & restart, they matched up exactly.