A Brief Story of My Search for Penguins

I was thinking yesterday about the video I posted last week by The Beautiful South – “You Keep It All In” – and laughing to myself about the use of the person in the penguin costume and how bad that was.

So I went off in search of other music videos with penguins.  The first one I hit on was “Evil is Afraid,” by Insane Clown Posse.  Now, I don’t know too much about Insane Clown Posse – I know they incorporate rapping and heavy guitars, and that they perform in clown makeup and all, but I can’t say that I really know anything about their music.  S I clicked on the video unsure of what I would see.  (Warning: I’m not sure how much you want to watch, depending on your musical predilections, so you might just want to watch enough to just get a taste.)

I’m not sure if Evil is afraid, but God knows that I was after watching this – Zoinks!  And where are the penguins???   I felt misled by Youtube – what type of classification system was at work here?

So, since that video wasn’t really what I was after.  I knew that a little bit of what I was after, and what I wasn’t. I decided I needed to do a touch more research, and I set some ground rules.  I would not search for animated penguins – no, I was on the hunt for people in penguin costumes – and I would not click on the many many entries for something called “Club Penguin,” which seems to be some sort of game in which you take songs and make up your own animated videos for them.  I was also trying to avoid any videos of people dancing in penguin costumes, which seems to be something of a genre itself and who knew that?  No, what I was after, what I hoped to find, was a music video in which someone put on a penguin costume and sought to incorporate it into the video itself.

It took longer than it should have, but soon enough I  found this video.

Here we’re firmly back in the land of the ridiculously bad.  What’s not to love?  The horrible Mad Hatter wardrobe, the over-the-top acting, the weird Batman visual references at the beginning, the sets that are clearly the house and neighborhood of someone in the crew, the shoddy camerawork, even the use of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.”  It warmed my heart to see this – and healed the wounds opened up by Insane Clown Posse.  (But then again, the cast and crew seem to be German, so I guess the outcome of this endeavor was something we could expect – after all, who can forget the luminous “99 Luft Balloons” or “Rock Me Amadeus”?)

All in all, I’m not sure that I can call it a successful endeavor, my search for penguins in music videos, for there really ISN’T a full-fledged use of a penguin costume in the video.  I’m not sure I’m disappointed though, as I feel like I still struck a but of gold.  And I suppose I need not give up – they may still be out there.  And hey, after all, there are other animals, or animal costumes anyway, that pose other possibilities for brilliance.