Waaaay back in the day, Fenzel and I decided that it would be a good idea to write an elaborate Broadway musical.  About zombies.  There have actually been zombie musicals before, mind you, but what sets ours apart is that it would be played completely straight.  Or rather, as I think one of us said at the time, “No parody element that we can dream up is going to be more fundamentally ridiculous than the fact that there are singing zombies on the stage.”

Anyway, that was a long time ago.  We put in a lot of work.  But we did not put in enough.  And for a long time, it looked like no part of Brains! The Musical of The Living Dead would ever see the light of day.

But since we mentioned the project on the podcast a while back, it seemed only appropriate to toss something up this week.  This isn’t necessarily the best song we wrote for the show, but it’s definitely the most stand-alone-y.  All that you need to know to enjoy this is that the heroes are about to make a stand against the zombie hordes, and they’re reviewing strategy.  The guy who is singing is named Hank.  (That might not have made the final draft.)

Here’s the sheet music:

The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (PDF)

Here’s a terrible MIDI realization (think of it as lo-fi, if that helps).

The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (MP3)

And here are the lyrics…

Check out the names above the title. Christian who?

I feel like the words “cult classic” sometimes get used to defend pretty much any film that was a complete commercial failure. Saying a movie is a cult classic can be the equivalent of saying a girl has a nice personality. But to me, Newsies is a real, actual cult classic. I know this because if you casually name-drop the movie in public, four out of five people will stare at you blankly, and the fifth will jump up and down and say “OH MY GOD I LOVE NEWSIES!!”

For the four out of five of you, the movie is based on the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899. Christian Bale plays Jack “Cowboy” Kelly, a vaguely Dickensian street urchin with an accent as majestic as the Brooklyn Bridge. Back in those days, the newsboys had to buy the papers themselves (and eat the cost for any they couldn’t unload). So when Joseph Pulitzer decides to start charging them an extra 1/10^th cent for each pape (the cool kids call them papes) it’s a big deal. (I believe 1/10^th cent is about $84 in today’s money.)

But before this goes down, Jack gets to sing a song about his fondest dream: leaving New York behind to move out west. It’s called “Santa Fe.” Please take a moment to enjoy Batman singing and dancing.

X-Ray gun? Yes. Pants? Not bloody likely.

Greetings, Earth-People:

Against the advice of some, and as many of you may know, I gladly (if not always ably) serve as the Overthinking It staff scientist™.  It’s an odd amalgam of roles, requiring mostly that I be at-the-ready if one of my fellow overthinkers needs a formula derived, has questions about standard units of measurement, or if something they took a pill for keeps on doing its thing for more time than they wanted/expected it to.

(I’m talking about erections, there.)

(…well, mosly.)

On rare occasion, though, I also get the chance to directly OverThink an aspect of Science in the popular culture.  The last time I did this for any serious length, actually, one of you responded to it by trying to debunk Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

We in the Scientific community hope you get the help you so desperately deserve, Joe Nahhas, anonymous OTI reader.*

Still, if nothing else this may serve as some general indicator of a demand for sciency-type-stuff on our humble website.  Now, said sciencey-goop finds its way into our popular milieu through more venues than that most obvious route of Science Fiction.  As has been beautifully enumerated elsewhere, action movies are particularly adept at taking the kinds of “liberties” with Physics (both stunt- and plot-based) that can only be considered awe-inspiring.  But beyond that, arguably any cultural element for which characters, say, depend on some trendy (if not fictional) electronic devices, or suffer from/receive medical care for a fictional (if not trendy) ailment, evokes the Specter of Science in that work.  Not to mention those pop culture artifacts that, though not ostensibly about science, per se, feature a character who’s a scientist…

This isn't helping things... for anyone.

The thing is, I have my favorite examples of where Pop Culture gets it right, (and wrong), but listening to me gripe about it isn’t much fun, is it?  It’s time to crowd-source it.

SO, dear OTI readers, I’d like you to chime in on a semi-regular piece I’ll write called “Ask A Scientist.”  I’d title it something more creative, but it takes enough self-restraint for me not publish these posts with an abstract and Materials/Methods section.  We’ll worry about the nuances of “clever titles,” “word order,” and “not using swear words to describe other peoples’ work in print” later.

Let’s get the ball rolling.  Got something you’ve seen on TV, in a movie that makes you think, “Is that really how that would work?”  or, “there’s no way a platypus could survive that!” or “can you really tell if it’s human DNA just by looking at a cartoon of it?”**  Sound off in the comments.  Or, you can always send me an email at mlawski@childfriendfinder.com shechner at overthinkingit dot com with your questions/observations regarding science in the popular media.

The lucky ones will get their questions addressed in an OverThought and moderately comic way, by me: Dave Shechner, professional scientist™.  Unlucky ones will be publicly harangued by me: Dave Shechner, semi-professional harague-ist (RM; patent-pending).

Extremely lucky ones will get a T-shirt bearing the likeness of Mr. Peter Fenzel.

And of course, members of the OTI writing staff, or its parent corporation are eligible to enter, and are encouraged to do so.

Nanoo nanoo.

* It was Joe Nahhas.
** Don’t get me started.  Seriously.

“Thriller a Broadway musical?”

That’s how the Associated Press derisively reported plans to adapt Michael Jackson’s classic song/music video to a Broadway musical. It goes downhill from there; it seems the haters have written this one off about as fast as the Internet’s collective knee can reflexively jerk.

Make a music video a musical? Silly, right? Not really. First, it’s not just based on the music video; there’ll be plenty of other Jacko songs in the show (I know, that makes it a “jukebox musical,” but that’s a rabbit hole that I won’t go down right now). But at its heart, this is just another adaptation of the visual styling and plot from one art form (music video) to another (musical theater).

How is this so different from…say, the upcoming Watchmen movie?

(Image from Rope of Silicon)

There, I did it. I compared the “Thriller” musical to the Watchmen movie. OK, I know, not all adaptations are created equally (No Country for Old Men, novel made into a movie. Wing Commander, video game made into a travesty.), and that the “Thriller” musical is getting bad buzz partly due to Michael Jackson’s tarnished public image. But it’s an adaptation, and that by itself is no reason to condemn a work of popular culture.

So I, for one, welcome the ‘Thriller’ musical, and I do hope that it sets the precedence for a Guns ‘n’ Roses “November Rain” musical:

Hey, you know what else would make a great musical?

Watchmen.

The writer of Man of La Mancha passed away on December 21. However, in accordance with his wishes, his wife didn’t let anyone know until after Christmas, “so as not to spoil anyone’s holiday.”

A little TOO quixotic. And yeah, I really do think.

(By the way, read to the bottom of the article. Turns out before he was a writer, he was a hobo. Yes: a hobo.)

So musician Damon Alburn (Blur) and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl) joined forces to create The Gorillaz, a fictional cartoon band with real albums that are actually kind of cool. They then upped the ante with Monkey: Journey to the West, a live “circus opera” in Chinese.

Now, they’re releasing an album of the music from the production, and Hewlett has directed a music video for the first single.

I have no idea what the hell is going on, but it seems like Damon’s come a long way from getting his head checked by a jumbo jet.

Anyone speak Chinese?

The film composer Howard Shore has written an opera. It is an adaptation of one of the movies he did the music for. However, it’s probably not the one you’d expect/hope. Here’s a list of operatic movies Howard Shore has scored, that are NOT the movie in question: The Lords of the Rings, The Departed, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Aviator, and The Gangs of New York.

Instead, Howard Shore looked back upon his body of work, and decided The Fly really needed to be an opera. And there’s a photo after the jump.

I’m a little late to the party on this, and I’m reticent to go too political in this blog, but this piece of overthinking is too good and right up our alley to go unremarked.

By the way, this isn’t the last time I’ll discuss LisaNova, who I think is a very interesting cultural figure about which you can say quite a bit. But without further ado:

The amazing original clip and a bit more analysis after the jump . . .

Since you are no doubt eagerly awaiting news of your favorite ex-Broadway show, the NYT has done a post-mortem on Glory Days (obligatory joke: “Don’t you mean… Glory Day? Ha!”). From the article:

But neither Mr. Blaemire nor Mr. Gardiner [the show's barely-legal writing team] seems to be rattled; both said they were not nearly as upset about the whole experience as their mothers were. They are, in fact, working on their next show.

“If you look at it from the outside, these guys were in a fast situation, moved a show that wasn’t ready, it flopped and they’re a failure; I could see how you would think that would not be worth anyone’s time,” Mr. Blaemire said. “But from our perspective, we got a chance to learn everything about what it takes to put on a Broadway show.”

Oh good. Our protagonists have learned to wipe Mom’s tears and stoically get back on the bike. Cheesy enough to be the plot of a Broadway flop.

I’m being snotty (duh, it’s teh inturwebz), and of course I would probably give several toes for the opportunity to have even a failure with that high a showbiz profile. Actually, as I read it, the article lays most of the blame on a producing team who pushed the show too far too fast (or just too far) rather than on the writers, who come off sympathetic,

Fleeting Stage Glory, Savored and Survived [NYT]