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therecordconnection · 3 months ago

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Ranting and Raving: "Video!" by Jeff Lynne

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There is no such thing as the “Cult Classic” anymore. Today, if a movie fails or a television series flops, it’s just removed and completely forgotten without a second thought. With physical releases no longer having the same cultural weight as before, it makes media preservation even harder. I hear if you complain long enough about this and get caught, Netlfix or Hulu or Pooblo or Tuubah or whatever else comes to your house and hits you with the Neuralyzer from Men in Black so you’ll shut up.

In the eighties, this wasn’t the case. Movies could brick at the box office, but they might get lucky and find their audiences later on through cable or video rentals or just really good word of mouth. Xanadu still exists today and has love because HBO kept showing it during its infancy and LGBTQ audiences eventually latched onto it (though that’s probably more due to the everlasting power of Olivia Newton-John’s gay fanbase). Phantom of the Paradise owes its continued love and existence to Guillermo Del Toro, the Daft Punk robots, and all of Winnipeg, Canada really loving that movie. I’m with them in that boat (Phantom is one of my favorite movies). Electric Dreams, a 1984 science fiction-tinged romantic comedy, exists today purely through video rentals and good word of mouth.

Electric Dreams is a wonderfully weird cult classic in every sense of the word. It has a very lovably goofy eighties rom-com setup and delivery: Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen), a loser tech nerd geologist who gets no bitches, falls in love with his new apartment neighbor Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen), a quirky and beautiful cellist. They're an unlikely pair in every conceivable way, but they fall for each other. The only problem is that Miles' fancy new supercomputer (who becomes sentient and later identifies himself as “Edgar”) would like to see Miles destroyed so that he can be with her instead. Edgar then does everything in his power to ruin Miles’ life and his chances to be with Madeline. Eventually, Edgar comes to accept the love between Miles and Madeline and they get their happily-ever-after.

On paper, the whole thing probably sounded silly to a 1984 audience, which might be why nobody bothered to see it at the time, but Electric Dreams fucking rules. Von Dohlen and Madsen are great and have such an odd yet instantly lovable chemistry with each other that you can’t help but root for them (it helps that they were good friends instantly and remained that way until Van Dohlen passed away in 2022). Steve Barron, one of the great music video directors of the early MTV era (he’s responsible for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Toto’s “Africa” and “Rosanna,” and many more), brings that same music video storytelling style to this movie’s visuals. If this movie had done better upon release, it would’ve gotten everything Miami Vice’s directing style often gets credited for. The soundtrack is also really great! Giorgio Moroder did the movie’s theme with Human League frontman Phil Oakey as well as a killer score for it (only Moroder could find a way to expertly turn Bach’s “Minuet” into a duel between a cello and a computer. He couldn't get more eighties than that if he tried). There’s also a really neat Heaven 17 cut that sounds like a Crash Bandicoot level theme (“Chase Runner”), Culture Club right at the end of their relevance (“Love is Love” and “The Dream”), and Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra with arguably the two best songs in the movie. One of them, “Let It Run,” is awesome as hell, but “Video!” is the one we’re gonna talk about.

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“Video!” appears at a pretty pivotal point in the movie. It soundtracks the montage of one of Miles and Madeline’s first proper dates, which involves sneaking away from a tour group to run around and play in Alcatraz (I’m serious). They’re also seen together at a carnival. Before this date, Miles tasks Edgar with finding a way to write music for Madeline. He intends to pass off whatever Edgar comes up with as his own work, hoping to impress her and make her fall in love with him. This is one of the main reasons Edgar wants Miles out of the picture. He knows he can make music with Madeline (he did it previously in “The Duel” scene, though Madeline thinks Miles is providing the music, not the computer) and fell in love with her by doing that. He is fully aware that Miles is trying to win her love with a lie. Once Edgar figures out how rhythm works, he figures out how melody is made by reviewing and absorbing the music playing in television commercials. “Video!” then starts playing proper once he’s got the basics down. For a computer with no previous songwriting experience, writing a Jeff Lynne composition is a pretty impressive feat!

Electric Dreams is not the first movie Lynne has contributed music to. There are two others. The first one was 1976’s All This and World War II, which is a movie which pairs all-star covers of Beatles songs and World War II footage. I’ve never seen it and I don’t think I need to. But you can hear Lynne, the most famous Beatles fanboy to ever live, do a fully symphonic version of “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Nowhere Man.” It’s pretty cool. The other one was Xanadu, which is much more well known. Lynne provided five songs: “I’m Alive,” “The Fall,” “Don’t Walk Away,” “All Over the World,” and the title track with Olivia Newton-John. I think they’re all great. Xanadu totally works on its own as a great ELO EP if you want to forget there’s a movie attached.

This is all to say that Lynne was no stranger to giving songs to strange movies, even if he harbored regrets later on about doing that. He regretted Xanadu for a while, but made peace with it decades later (he re-recorded “Xanadu” in 2000 for the ELO compilation Flashback and he’s revived “All Over the World” for every ELO tour since 2017). I don’t know how he feels about Electric Dreams and at this point, he’s done so much in his career that I doubt he even remembers it. I think he should! I think “Video!” is a great song and I think he was a perfect fit for Electric Dreams. The entire soundtrack is dated as hell, but in a fun time-capsule kind of way. It represents the sound of what people in 1984 thought the future was going to sound like. Lynne had already spent time imagining the sounds of the future.

At the dawn of the eighties, Jeff Lynne had gotten tired of dealing with the big orchestras you hear on that great ELO run from 1976-1980. Orchestras started becoming a pain in the ass for him around the time when synthesizers and keyboards were getting some big technological boosts. New wave artists like Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, and the Human League were pushing synths and keyboard sounds into the mainstream and proving that the new technology could be used to make some wildly futuristic sounds. Lynne quickly learned that with a few fancy keyboards, you could start simulating strings and classical sounds, but in a new and exciting way. Suddenly, Lynne and ELO keyboardist Richard Tandy could keep the symphonic pop sounds the band had been making, but update the sound and take it into the future. Suddenly, the “Orchestra” part of the ELO name suddenly found itself obsolete and out of a job.

Dick Clark asked him about this choice on an American Bandstand appearance in 1986. Lynne responded, “Well, you know, I got fed up with using a big orchestra because they used to always be in a union and stuff like that and they used to put their equipment away while we were still recording. So I thought what we'll do is we'll use just ourselves and then we can work as long as we'd like and nobody would complain.”

So Lynne took advantage of all this new technology that was floating around and used it to craft the 1981 masterpiece, Time. That album is the best example of retrofuturism in music I can give. In Time, Lynne imagines a loose concept album about a guy who gets yoinked out of 1981 and flung into the year 2095. The entire album is full of songs where Lynne imagines a future that he would never live to see (I won’t either, unless I somehow make it to a full century of life). Hover cars, rides to the moon, robotic girlfriends (built by IBM) who can also serve as telephones, prison satellites, ivory towers, plastic flowers, and meteor showers as a common weather condition are all present in Lynne’s visions of the distant future. Most of his predictions feel like they’re coming out of science fiction magazines from when he was a child, but the album is more concerned with just letting his imagination run wild and wonder about how one would feel if they were flung far into the future where everyone they’ve ever loved is gone. The future presented in Time feels like daydreaming rather than any kind of cautionary tale or warning. I’ve never gotten the sense that Lynne thinks any of what’s in the album will actually come true.

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If Lynne got anything right, he somehow nailed the still-lingering nostalgic yearning to return to the eighties. Lynne’s narrator constantly laments that he’s stuck in 2095 and 1981 is name dropped in “Ticket to the Moon” and “The Way Life’s Meant to Be.” “Ticket to the Moon” even begins with what is now a variation of the only kind of Youtube comment you’ll find on any old song from the decade: “Remember the good old 1980s / When things were so uncomplicated / I wish I could go back there again / And everything could be the same.” He might as well have called himself “Nostradamus” when writing that one, because that line is going to keep feeling accurate to people until every child of the eighties and every vintage style eighties cosplayer on instagram is dead and in the ground. Lynne using the current year the album was made in had a real danger of seriously dating it, but Time has never sounded dated to me. It doesn’t sound like anything else from 1981 and it still doesn’t. Lynne blended all the old sounds and genres he loved and infused them with the new sounds of the day on that one and imagined a future that still sounds just as magical then as it does now. It took pop music a few years to catch up with what Lynne was doing on that one. Time is still a retro futuristic dream and he carried all the tech and sound effects that he was using on that album with him when he made “Video!” for Electric Dreams. ELO’s future was up in the air by 1984 (Lynne would dissolve the original band for good two years later) so he tackled “Video!” as a solo artist (literally, as no other ELO members are on this) and released it under his own name.

I don’t know if Lynne’s predictions for 2095 will come true. The verdict is still out on that. But what I do know is that everything Lynne is describing in “Video!” is a reality that I’ve lived to see, though perhaps differently from anything Lynne could’ve imagined in 1984. We’ll get there.

In the context of Electric Dreams, “Video!”’s lyrics are all about the many things Edgar the computer can find out about the world in pre-internet cyberspace. He can watch it all, from rock n’ roll to old time movie scenes, and learn. He has no other choice: he can’t move from Miles’ desk and see it himself. Nothing in Lynne’s lyrics are dated except for one thing. He mentions that satellites “send their love from up above / Down to [his] VTR.” VTRs, which I believe is meant to be a reference to “Video Tape Recorder,” is an obsolete machine in 2024. It’s long been replaced by digital video, such as DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K. That’s the only specific reference he makes besides working in both the movie’s title and the title of the Phil Oakey/Giorgio Moroder collab. “They beam across the sky / Together in Electric Dreams.” I imagine Lynne was probably told he had to work in the title somewhere. To his credit, it’s a pretty smooth title drop. Clumsier movie songs have done it much worse.

Lynne sneaks in a few lyrics in the song that become ominous and foreshadowing if you’ve seen the movie more than once. The first two verses end ominously with the lines “The world is at my fingers / Under control” and “I’ll just stay here on my end / I’ll have it all.” Those lines foreshadow Edgar eventually using his supercomputer intellect to control other computer systems and mess with Miles’ life, from cutting off access to his credit cards and funds, to manipulating phone lines so Madeline can’t call Miles later in the movie for comfort when her cello has been broken in an accident (it gets caught in an elevator door and gets crushed). His whole motivation in the movie is that he “wants it all,” especially Madeline. Lynne later captures that ominousness with the absolute beast of a song “Let It Run,” but “Video!” is reserved for Lynne soundtracking the moment where Edgar stays inside and excitedly discovers the world at large and how to write pop music, while Miles simultaneously goes out and discovers the world at large with his lovely lady.

Musically, “Video!” strikes a balance and finds a perfect blend of the mechanical and the human elements of music making. Lynne seemed to understand that more than some of the art-school new wavers that were ruling the US and the UK in the early eighties. The entire song is mechanical, but that makes sense given the in-universe explanation that a literal computer is making it. The rhythm is provided by a drum machine and everything else is synthesized and sequenced to hell and back. Even the fun sound effects throughout the song and during the middle instrumental bit are canned and not original to the song. There’s something that kinda sounds like a twangy guitar at the end of the verses and on the chorus, but that could just as easily be a keyboard making that sound. Lynne has made records where he’s played all instruments organically, but keyboards, sequencers, and machines not only suit the assignment, they’re necessary for the assignment.

The human elements are Jeff Lynne’s vocals and his always sharp sense of melody. Lynne’s never been the most mind blowing singer, but his vocals and melodies capture a magic and a warmth here that few of the survivors from his generation still making music in 1984 were capable of. He sings the song with that same sense of wonder that he has on Time. I love the melody of the verses and that chorus is so upbeat and happy and infectious. I love the way he slides into the chorus by holding out the word “on” before saying “video.” Oooooooon! It’s pop music at its most delightfully fun.

I’ve been surrounded by video my entire life, but Lynne makes it feel like it’s a brand new concept to me when I hear this song. I said that everything Lynne is describing in “Video!” is a reality that I’ve lived to see. That reality is Youtube. “The world is at my fingers” because I can more-or-less search for whatever I want (whether I actually find it is another story). The entire second verse can be used to describe someone discovering Youtube for the first time:

I see that rock and roll And all those old-time movies scenes They beam across the sky Together in electric dreams I'll just sit here on my end I'll have it all

Youtube, for all its numerous (numerous) flaws, allows me to be my own MTV VJ and watch scenes from my favorite movies with only a few mouse clicks. I can sit at my computer and watch videos in comfort (and while eating my dinner). Like Edgar, I have it all. Lynne sings that verse with completely sincere jubilance. The song is entirely mechanized, but the feelings presented in the song are not and they help provide a warmth and joy to the whole song that makes it sound like a dream. Lynne makes the concept of watching video sound like it’s the most exciting technical marvel you’ll ever see. He sells it like he’s Grover Cleveland lighting up the 1893 World Fair. It’s fantastic. Lynne isn’t even just fascinated by video, he’s fascinated by the entire process that helps bring it to life. That first verse takes the song from the hugeness of outer space and leads it to the small and insular space of a computer in an apartment without ever losing a step.

The satellites that search the night They twinkle like a star They send their love from up above Down to my VTR

Lynne sounds absolutely amazed by the technological wonders of 1984. He sings it with a child-like fascination that’s so lovably dorky. He sounds like Miles Harding does in the movie when he gets to talk to Madeline about architecture and his dream project during dinner. I was only ten years old when Youtube first arrived in December of 2005, so I essentially grew up with the rise of the internet and internet video creation. I imagine it must have been mind blowing to older people who were there to witness that boom. Maybe some of them were as excited as Lynne sounds on this song.

Nowadays, we take a lot of the modern technology around us for granted, but for Lynne in 1984, this was all exciting and new. That might be where the excitement and exuberance in the song stems from. Betamax and VHS had only existed for about a decade when Electric Dreams first came out, so people were only just getting started in terms of building up home video libraries and having video readily available to them. Camcorders were only starting to become a common commodity when Electric Dreams arrived, so I imagine people were going nuts and losing their minds that they could make home movies and shoot video of their own. Nowadays, technology has reached the point where the little bricks in our pockets (which are Edgar-level supercomputers of their own) can do almost anything, even film video anytime, anywhere. Now more than ever, the world really is at our fingers due to the way technology and social media keeps us interconnected.

“Video!” sees a continuation of Jeff Lynne’s interests in technology and the future that he was exploring on the Time album. Once again, his music is featured in a movie that’s weird, strange, and ridiculous, but also incredibly fun. “Video!” and Electric Dreams as a whole, is a beautiful little time capsule. It arrived during a time when the wonders of the future and technology was full of optimism and we were once again evaluating our relationship to tech as the world was continuing to undergo constant change. After Electric Dreams, Lynne would examine his own relationship with technology with the 1986 song “Calling America,” one of the last ELO singles before he went off to enjoy a second life as an in-demand producer for a while. He doesn’t sound as excited when he sings “Yeah, we’re living in a modern world” on that one. He doesn’t sound as excited about satellites on that one either, though that might have more to do with him being fully sick of ELO by that point and having to wrap up one last album before he can move on to other things.

Electric Dreams, both the movie and the soundtrack, aren’t as well remembered as Xanadu and I think that’s a shame. Electric Dreams is such a strange, beautiful, and moving love story. It’s the thinking man’s version of Spike Jonze’s Her (it’s also better than Her). The movie only played in theaters for a few short weeks before resigning to its fate as a strange movie you take a chance on when you’re wandering around the video store on a Friday night and you and your partner are looking for something interesting to watch. In hindsight, maybe a movie like Electric Dreams was just too strange to ever capture mainstream attention.

But don’t feel bad for it! It’s lived and has found its share of people who love it, despite its initial failure. I’m one of them. Lenny Von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen are also in that boat. They loved working on it and had nothing but positive things to say about it. Madsen still considers it one of the best things she’s ever made and I agree with her. Cult classics like Electric Dreams find their audience. Sometimes it just takes a while.

I can tell you that Tumblr absolutely fucking LOVES this movie. If you do a search for “#electric dreams” you will find SO. MUCH. FANART for this movie in that tag. It’s not even funny. Tumblrinas L O V E making art of Edgar the computer. They love making art of him so much, you’d think he’s the protagonist of the movie, not Miles and Madeline. You’d also think Miles, Madeline, and Edgar are in a polycule with each other (hot take: polyamory would not have saved them). The fanart in that tag isn’t even that old either. People love this movie and they love him. (A shocking number of fanart posts depict Edgar hanging out with GLaDOs from Portal, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and AM from the Harlan Ellison short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. I have come to the conclusion that Tumblr really loves antagonistic machines).

Electric Dreams celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year (it came out on July 20th, 1984, so this post missed its birthday by eleven days). An unloved film in its time, but a lovably strange and beautifully sincere science fiction romance that remains a beloved cult classic to those who know about it. If you want to see the film for yourself, it’s on Youtube for free. I highly recommend it.

Jeff Lynne is also celebrating this year. At the time of this writing, he’s preparing to take his modern day version of Electric Light Orchestra on the road one more time before retiring for good (he’s calling it the Over and Out Tour, which I think is just a fantastic name). He’s definitely not going to play “Video!” but he’ll be playing every ELO banger in existence, of which there are many. If you’ve never seen the maestro present his music live, I highly recommend you catch him before it’s too late. I plan on going to one of the Philadelphia nights. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

“Video!” and Electric Dreams are snapshots of a simpler time that dared to get a little silly and dream about a possible future. Some of its ideas about where technology was headed and our relationship to that technology were hauntingly accurate, some of it is hilariously outdated. Lynne’s visions of video and where video technology ended up being incredibly accurate in all the best ways. Video madness came upon us like a trance in the dark and because of that madness and the internet that houses all that madness, a movie that went completely unnoticed forty years ago can still exist and float out there today, waiting to be found. It wants to share with you what the world looked like during an interesting crossroads in time and it wants to show you what people thought the future might look like. Electric Dreams wants you to know that the future is strange, but it’s also bright and love can be found in the strangest of places if you know where to look. Don’t worry. It’s all under control and it’s all on video.

Electric Dreams sends its love to you. Send some of yours back to it.

#original post #ranting and raving #jeff lynne #electric light orchestra #electric dreams #electric dreams 1984 #Youtube

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satoshi-mochida · 6 months ago

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Tomba! Special Edition launches August 1 for PS5, Switch, and PC, later for PS4

From Gematsu

*There's a few short videos on the site I can't copy/paste on here

Tomba! Special Edition will launch for PlayStation 5, Switch, and PC via Steam on August 1, followed by PlayStation 4 at a later date, developer Limited Run Games announced.

Here is an overview of the game, via Limited Run Games:

About

Tomba! returns in Tomba! Special Edition, the ultimate version of the legendary platforming masterpiece. As the titular Tomba, you leap, bite, and throw your way across stunning 2.5D landscapes on a quest to overcome a deplorable cadre of nefarious pigs. Along the way, you’ll explore ancient relics, discover fascinating characters, unlock thrilling quests, and unearth hidden treasures. It’s a platforming adventure that perfectly fuses linear and nonlinear gameplay styles. Tomba! was first published in 1997, and is back today in a vastly-expanded special edition packed with quality of life improvements.

Key Features

Save Anywhere! No more worrying about heading back to a checkpoint.

Rewind! Stuck on a difficult challenge? Try again!

Toggle for analog control

A museum crammed with classic print advertisements, original packaging and manuals, never- before-seen dev documents, and high-res original artwork.

A new remastered soundtrack.

Interview with the creator, Tokuro Fujiwara.

And here is a new interview with Tomba! creator Tokuro Fujiwara published on PlayStation Blog:

In 1997, when you made Tomba!, most developers focused on making 3D games like Tomb Raider or Crash Bandicoot. You instead decided to mix 2D sprites with perspective-shifting 3D environments. Why? Tokuro Fujiwara: “Tomba! runs on 3D technology, with gameplay designed around 2D principles. This is why it’s described as a 2.5D game. I think 2D games have a certain kind of charm that 3D doesn’t. I also wanted to push the limits of what could be done. To bring my vision to life, I needed to use 2D principles along with 3D CG visuals. This allowed me to create something that felt new on the PlayStation. “There were times when I wondered if I should go 3D instead, 3D games have a very clear sense of space. In 2D, all the action takes place on a flat plane, and multiple layers provide a sense of depth. This means you have to design the game in creative ways so that the different layers don’t conflict. This results in something interesting that can only be achieved with 2D.” What do you hope new players will take away from Tomba! Special Edition? Fujiwara: “Tomba! has many side quests. These come in different varieties and are hidden throughout the game. I encourage players to seek them out. Various items allow players to learn new moves, expanding how levels can be beaten. I hope players search and seal away the Evil Pigs scattered throughout the world, which will unlock even more to see! There are many discoveries to be made. I hope players can relax and enjoy the world of Tomba!” Speaking of genre-bending gameplay. Tomba! feels like an open world despite being described as a side-scrolling platformer. This was largely due to how nonlinearly the levels could be played. Was this done intentionally, or was it something that just happened through development? Fujiwara: “I had envisioned this open-feel game from the very beginning. It was all a blur when things started, but as development progressed, it began taking shape. “You could consider Tomba! an open-world title, a term that was rarely used back then. There’s a wide area with a lot of different content in it. You encounter, discover, and collect various things as you move around. For example, you have to complete certain tasks in Tomba!, but you can wander around freely and complete them however you like. Some tasks and main objectives can even be skipped entirely. Many of the ideas I envisioned for Tomba! back in the day were ideas we see in open-world game design today. “I initially wanted to include 100 quests, but the final game exceeded that. It was hard work for the team to fit it all together on a timeline. What started out as vague ideas in my head ballooned into an amount of content so large it blew my mind!” The original PlayStation was a massive leap in gaming technology. What was it like to experience it back then? Fujiwara: “Game development is an ongoing battle against technology growth. This was the case back then and is still true today. I felt that the PlayStation was such a remarkable improvement in terms of hardware, allowing for greater possibilities. Games went from being rendered in pixels to CG. Game developers had to learn many new skills. Expectations ballooned along with the scope of game ideas. Development environments evolved, which made things challenging but exciting for developers. The introduction of the PlayStation and the advancements from that era still impact games today.” Finally, why do you think it’s important to bring Tomba! back now? Fujiwara: “Tomba! has been around for a long time, but continues to be loved by many. I’ve long wished that the game could be accessible to more people on modern systems. Now that the opportunity is here, I think PlayStation fans today will get a ton of enjoyment out of Tomba!“

#Tomba! Special Edition #Tomba #Tombi #Whoppee Camp #Limited Run Games #Gematsu

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