Now that my mother has been on Facebook for a couple years, I stop thinking of the situation in terms of “Oh god what is she going to see” and more in terms of “Hey, I can share links to videos and articles without opening my email!” While both processes are relatively easy, it’s just more fun to post it to her wall and not have it mired in an inbox full of forwarded puppy photos.
So today, thinking that I haven’t sent her anything in a while, an idea popped in my head – when I was a kid, she used to LOVE the video for Janet Jackson’s “Runaway.” You know the one, where she’s hopping off of buildings like Spiderman and landing in lush and colorful foreign lands, where she is instantly welcomed and joined for choreographed dance numbers. Obviously, I was a child of the early 90′s and even more obviously, I loved the video too.
With my seemingly simple plan in place, I headed to YouTube and searched for “janet jackson runaway”. Immediately, something stood out as suspicious – one of the auto-complete searches was for “janet jackson runaway official music video” – always a dead giveaway that several versions exist on this vast digital wasteland, therefore the latter three words are a necessity. I braced myself for the search results.
On the following page, only two videos matched the title I wanted. One was clearly the old “Here is a 3 and half minute shot of the album cover, uploaded simply so you can listen to the song and do work in another tab.” The other result carried the curious description, “Slide Show on my pics.”
It was simply that, yet so much more.
If you view the embedded clip below, you’ll find something I consider to be as hilarious as any Funny or Die clip on YouTube. It baffles me that user “jigg074″ took the time to take the in-tact music video, import it into a rudimentary editing program (let’s assume by the craftsmanship that it’s Windows Movie Maker), and ever so casually layer in reverse Ken Burns shots of her face – and not different shots, the same one. Multiple times. The kind of snapshot you look at once and go, “Well, that is her…not the best angle, but whatever.” The whole video!
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. And don’t worry – I still posted it on my mom’s wall. Now I don’t have to get her a Christmas gift.