Omg!! I first heard about the song Prisencolinensinainciusol here on the SDMB (one example here). It’s a campy gibberish song from 1972, and they just played it at the Olympics opening ceremony!
I’m actually watching the opening ceremony here in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The speakers are formally opening the games with speeches in English, but the announcer on the TV is loudly speaking over them and translating the speeches into French.
You know what other song played today is wacky? The Italian National Anthem. I’ve heard it a million times and it never seems to grow on me. Always sounds like Circus music to me.
A personal anecdote: I’m a member of an all-male nine-pin bowling club, and in the heydays of Michael Schumacher in the 90s when he won 5 Formula One titles for Ferrari and approximately every second race, we used to watch every race together at each others homes in circulation. One of us has an Italian (Sicilian, to be precise) wife, and every time we watched at their house and Schumacher won a race and the Italian anthem was played, we all joked about how it was a carnival song. And we always got a lot of flak from the Sicilian wife, imagine a death stare from a Sicilian!
Nice ceremony, there were a couple of singers who really impressed me. The torches were cool and I like the more modest size cauldrons. The time travelling dance sequence was a little bit too much for me and the kid looking at the solar system model didn’t work for me. I’ve already had my fill of Snoop Dogg but you know NBC seems to be enamored with him. I always like the parade of nations and it seems to me with some editing we could have actually seen them all rather than skip so many.
I’m DVRing the whole shebang on the USA Network, so just like '24 it’s going to take ages to get through and I’ll only skip ahead if there’s a discussion here I feel like jumping in.
Right now I’m halfway through the opening ceremony. Dance-heavy intro and the little skit with the tram was pretty basic (especially compared to Paris’ extravaganza), but it was perfectly enjoyable. Only part I didn’t like (other than the eternally idiotic bumbling NBC announce team, which I’m going to have to just flippin’ live with) was Mariah Carey. I hated listening to her in the 90’s and I hate listening to her now. Those random ultrahigh notes are aggravation.
It’s nice that the athletes no longer have to cram their bodies into a limited space. Of course we want them to mingle, but it’s getting increasingly harder to find a properly accommodating venue. They have plenty of time to get acquainted in the Olympic Village. I was a bit surprised to learn that places like Saudi Arabia and Colombia not only have a presence here but want more in the future.
The production seems a tad disjointed. I understand that USA/NBC needs to fit in commercial breaks, but they’ve glossed over some fairly sizable contingents without so much as an athlete count (how do you blow off Belgium?). And if they insist on making Snoop Dogg this big brother figure, so be it, but we shouldn’t miss out on countries’ information for it. I seem to remember NBC doing a much better job handling these competing obligations in the past.
Stopped right after Israel, which got a chilly reception. Really, really think they should’ve had to join Russia in the neutral bin.