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Rocket Man Variations

This song is an excellent tune about the subject of leaving this gravity well, and in 1978 it won the 5th annual Science Fiction Film Awards prize for best song. That was the first year the awards ceremony was broadcast, but it is much better known under the name The Saturn Awards. I have no clue who had the idea that William Shatner should be the vocalist for this presentation, but as musical performances go it has a certain amusement value, and is certainly historically interesting. I have to think he played this up for the chuckle value, considering his excellent renditions of other songs, including Common People from Has Been and the Brutus Rap from Free Enterprise.

My personal favorite from the various artists who have rendered it over the years has to be the Kate Bush version. A noticeable percentage of her work were original science fiction songs, such as Experiment Number 4 where the military was developing a musical weapon. Or Lyra, her tribute to the book The Golden Compass, which someone later used footage from the movie to turn into a wonderful video. Or Cloudbusting which depicted the governments reaction to Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Energy research, and Donald Southerland made a wonderful Reich. If you are a humor fan, be sure to check out her duet with Rowan Atkinson.

Morning Jacket also did a version of the song, but this is the only one I know from them. Someone did a nice but low-rez job of adding space footage to this.

And finally, getting my vote for strangest video for a planetary exploration song, David Fonseca does the entire song backwards and in high heels as Ginger Rogers used to say when explaining why she was a better dancer than Fred Astaire. No, we don’t actually see the high heels in this video, but based on the makeup I would not be surprised at all if he was wearing them, and he did lip-sync the entire song backwards, which is no mean feat.

Major Tom Variations

Just as the Space Oddity variations grew, so did the sequel song, Major Tom, again focusing on the intrepid space wanderer. Here are a few of the choices, starting out with the Shiny Toy Guns flavor, from LA, and I love the footage that was pulled together to make up this version.

From Germany we have Peter Schilling’s 1983 version:

And then I Hate Kate‘s style…

Still with me? Then here is your reward, a truly unique version of the audio with a world-class build of the video for this song. Extra points for anyone who can correctly identify the band and the language they are singing in!

And the final entry in this segment…

New Wonders, 3D Star Wars

I am in the wrong country to watch the trailer for the new show on BBC 2’s web site, Wonders of the Universe, but perhaps you might be able to see it. For those of us on this side of the Atlantic Phil Plait, Mr. Bad Astronomer himself, posted the trailer on the Discovery Channel site from Professor Brian Cox’s previous series, Wonders of the Solar System. That should give you the general idea of what kind of program this will be; hope BBC America ends up picking it up. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter tells us they have announced the release date for Episode 1 of Star Wars in 3D; February 10th, 2012. The plan is to roll out one a year in Episode order rather than release order. Personally, I fell asleep in the theater during The Phantom Menace, so I will be waiting for 2015 to see the first one I care about.

Space Oddity variations

David Bowie’s Space oddity is one of the truly definitive Sci-Fi songs, bordering as it does both inner (mental aberrations and chemical dependencies) and outer (rocket ships and planetary exploration) space. So it should be no surprise that even though Bowie wrote and performed this masterpiece originally, many other artists from many other countries have paid tribute to it over the years. I figured I should present a few of my favorites, just to make sure awareness of these artists got whatever small increase my mentioning them could induce. First off, from Japan, we have Atsushi Sakurai, with his brilliant 2004 live presentation:

Next up, we have the short version of Emilie Simon’s amazing variation. This one has what may be my favorite rhythm structure of any of these, even if the editing that shortened the length cut off noticeable chunks of the song. Of course, you can always hear the full version here.

Bet you didn’t know there was a Natalie Merchant version, did you?

For comparison, here is Bowie’s first live presentation at an awards ceremony for this world class song…

Trailers: Red Riding Hood, Love

The movie Red Riding Hood trailer makes me think the tag line should be “it’s The Company Of Wolves meets Twilight“, and it’s directed by the original Twilight movie’s Catherine Hardwicke. Hopefully that does NOT mean this one is as bad as that series of films, because it does have a lot of good story potential. There are some more pictures here, and the film itself will hit the big screen in just a few weeks, on March 11th.

The movie Love looks amazing based on this trailer supplied by Angels and Airwaves and former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge. Release date is set for 14 February 2011, according to Geeks of Doom, as a combined CD and DVD.

ANGELS & AIRWAVES presents “LOVE” MOVIE TRAILER from Mark Eaton on Vimeo.