And a good morning to you, Overthinkers.

First, THE DEAD HAVE RISEN AND ARE MAKING ALBUMS. Not literally, of course, but a new album of rare and unreleased Jimi Hendrix tracks, “Valleys of Neptune,” debuted at #4 on the Billboard charts this week. Also, Michael Jackson’s estate signed a deal with Sony for $250,000,000 in exchange for ten albums over seven years. “In exchange” is perhaps a misnomer, since Blanket probably wouldn’t be in the studio cutting new hooks.

Just LEAVE ME ALOOOOOOOONE! Dah-dah nndah-da! Dah-dah nndah-di-da!

Second, MEN WITH GUNS ARE COMING FOR YOU, if you’re a protagonist in any of the movies opening this weekend that is. Repo Men (not to be confused with the cult classic), The Bounty Hunter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid open this weekend. Additionally, last year’s Swedish adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens to limited audiences in the States this weekend. If it’s half as good as the novel, see it.

Sorry for all the misleading headlines; you know we’re not normally like that. But THE BUS IS SPEEDING OUT OF CONTROL! HURRY UP AND SAVE YOUR … open thread.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, John Perich, and Jordan Stokes to overthink the tragic ends of Michael Jackson, D.J. AM, Ted Kennedy, and Reading Rainbow.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 61 (MP3)

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich to overthink stranger danger (and Wrather’s cross-country trip), Michael Jackson’s posthumous sales figures, McCourt…Frank McCourt, Walter Cronkite and the crisis of authority in newscasting, and Emmy Nominations.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!

Download Episode 55 (MP3)

In the Thriller music video, Michael and his date have the misfortune of passing by a graveyard right as the dead start to rise. To make matters worse for MJ’s girlfriend, he becomes zombified as well. In most zombie movies, this is the part where she gets her brains eaten. But this is not a standard Zombie Apocalypse. This is a Thrillerocalypse.

Sadly, YouTube isn’t letting me embed the actual dance. But here’s some Filipino prisoners giving it their best shot.

My question is: why do the Thriller zombies dance? The obvious answer is: it’s a music video, and people dance in music videos. However, I think there might be a plot-driven reason too.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Shana Mlawski (girl!), and John Perich to overthink celebrity deaths (tastefully), celebrity deathmatches (not tastefully), Transformers and the movie critics who love to hate them, favorite Michael Bay movies, and irony (those last two are not related). They take time to mock one listener voicemail and offer a variety of thoughtful perspectives on another.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!

Download Episode 52 (MP3)

We had something else on deck for Think Tank today—something to do with Bon Jovi’s lyrics, as I recall. But we couldn’t let Michael Jackson’s passing go unremarked. Here, the Overthinkers share memories, favorite songs, and a sense of Michael Jackson’s cultural impact.

Belinkie

When I was six, I was obsessed with Thriller. I used to put it on my Fisher Price record player and breakdance through the entire thing. Even the slow songs. Especially the slow songs.

I don’t have anything brilliant and new to say here. Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he never had a childhood, and he spent his whole life trying to compensate for that. Yes, I’m surprised at how sad I am.

I mainly just wanted to share a video. It’s from the Free to Be television special in 1974. That would make Michael 16. The song’s called “When We Grow Up,” and the refrain is “We don’t have to change at all.” Yes, the irony is crushing, but that’s not why I’m sharing it. I just like the song.

(The girl, by the way, is Roberta Flack. This is the year after she won three Grammy’s for “Killing Me Softly.”)

Shechner

A few years back, I used to front “The Max Fünk Institut,” a funk band made up of five biology graduate students and a dude we found on Craigslist. I like to think that we were about as funky as a bunch of white Ph.D. students could possibly be, which (all of us combined) is about as funky as some of MJ’s nail clippings.

One of the highlights of our brief career as working musicians came during the gig that ultimately proved to be our last.  We were brought up to Waterville Valley, NH, to provide the evening’s entertainment for the annual retreat of the group then-called The MIT Center for Cancer Research.  An outsider might assume that this’d be about as exciting as playing for a filing cabinet, but he’d be deeply mistaken.  Remember, scientists are good at distilling, synthesizing, or growing things.  All sorts of interesting things.

But I digress.  The members of MFI suspected that this might be our last gig together, and we wanted to pull out all the stops.  Closing our first set, we’d finally tear out a cover for a song all of us had loved as kids, and only much later realized was the funkiest goddamn piece of music not to have droppoed out of P-Funk or Mr. J.B.  I’m talking, of course, about Billie Jean.

The greatest recording artist of all time and the dominant fantasy woman of two decades of American life died today, Thursday, June 25, 2009. On the way to their rest, they followed not too far behind the hero of Kung Fu, a man who himself had become enough of a mystery that a great film was built around metacasting him.

I would wish none of their three deaths on my worst enemy. These were not people who died “ripe” in the way of pre-Shakespearean Lear, surrounded by family and friends and comforted that their lives were taken neither cruelly nor too soon. For their reasons, these were ugly deaths. I will not go into further detail on them, but it bears note, because in our day of media saturation, this is a big part of their stories and what these lives, looking back, mean to all of us.

When Bea Arthur passed, I felt I lost someone I knew. As a performer, she connected with people on the level of a cogent internal and external identity. She crafted human characters in a way that reinforced our mutual humility and dignity. Performers often comfort us by shedding light on the mysteries of identity and stitching together the broken parts of our common experience. Watching Bea Arthur act, and hearing she died, made it easy to be human.

Losing Michael Jackson like this, Farrah Fawcett like this, and David Carradine like this does no such thing.

“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.