Ruminations

YouTube is a merry media mosh pit for the worst and the best (and the most mediocre) of what happens when human imagination is presented with audiovisual technology, an arena, and no editor. Unsurprisingly, it's a showcase for Sturgeon's Law, but also for bits of retrieved memory and works of brilliance that make sifting through the dorky karaoke and home movies more than worth the annoyance.

This animated AMV for Vaughn Monroe's rendition of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, the work of one Pukipu, is one that I've come to regard as the definitive video for the song in question; the stiff, minimal, and primitive flavor of the animation somehow seems perfectly of a piece with the period setting, and its repetitiveness serves the incantatory nature of the song. More than that, it struck me somehow as having an unassailable rightness; the imagery was somehow hauntingly reminiscent of a memory I was at a loss to place:

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A discussion of favorite childhood TV commercials over on dungeonwriter’s blog helped supply the missing piece of the puzzle; this haunting PSA from the late 60's (the narrative Voice of Impending Doom is variously suspected of being either James Earl Jones or Thurl “Tony the Tiger’ Ravenscroft) was the stuff of nightmares to a lot of people in the late Baby Boom/early Gen-X age bracket:


Pukipu (if her userinfo is accurate) is Brazilian, and too young to remember the ad, making it an unlikely influence; nonetheless, I find the resemblance striking.