I’m 99.9% sure I saw this on SNL, and I can tell you it was pre-1979. It was a short “film” (video) set to the David Bowie song Fame. They flashed hundreds of famous faces at the beats of the music. Some were photos, some were paintings. I remember it being very cool, and have never seen it or heard of it since. My Google-fu has failed me on this one.
Anyone remember or know anything about this? Any Bowie experts out there? Maybe it was not SNL?
This is wildly different from what you’re specifying, but since nobody has replied yet, let’s assume for the moment that your memory is quite wrong about this. On The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968, there was a video for the song Classical Gas by Mason Williams. It consists of famous paintings flashing by very fast. The images did seem to move to the beat of the music, I guess:
Mason Williams was a writer for that show. The video was called 3000 Years of Art. (Yes, the video has a different name from the song.) It’s possible that you may have seen some show on TV that, many years later, played this video late at night, and this memory may be confused with watching Saturday Night Live about the same time.
I can’t find this video online, but perhaps your search skills are better than mine. Mason Williams continues to perform and there are videos of him performing this song. On at least one of them, which has him and an orchestra in front, you can see (but not very well) the video being shown in the background.
Thanks Wendell. I don’t think that was it. I seem to distinctly remember all the (recent) politicians and movie star photos. I remember a lot of Richard Nixon shots. The paintings were of pre-photography portraits, such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, etc.
I have thought that perhaps my memory is confused or worse (Did I dream that???), but damn, my memory of the most minute details from decades past is usually right on. My family calls me to settle questions of times past. I’m pretty convinced I saw it, and I’m sure it was Bowie, as I was a huge Bowie fan at the time. May have not been SNL as suggested. Perhaps it was a film shown on Midnight Special or something like that?
I’ve also thought perhaps a rights issue came up after airing, and it was pulled from any further syndication.
I finally did stumble across the film described. It was a student film shown on Midnight Special. Frankly, it’s much cruder than I remember it being. Funny how memory changes over time. The version in my brain is much cooler.
I thought it was a very cool video, FWIW. When I throw in consideration for what had to be done back then to make that compared to what you’d do today, it’s kind of mind-blowing to think that a student did that, presumably on his or her own; it’s very Larkin-like!
Big congratulations on getting to answer your own zombie question, too! That’s a rarity!
You can make your own video similar to this without too much trouble. Various photo apps have face recognition–you can select some or all of the faces in your photo library, dump 'em into a folder and then put them in a video using a fade or a time lapse tool. Add effects and music to taste and voila!
That reminds me of a short I saw on either Nickelodeon or HBO in the early eighties, back when they showed shorts in between shows/movies to fill the time. (Back in the early-to-mid-eighties, Nick was commercial-free.)
It was set to a score of entirely percussion instruments (drums/cymbals) and took us through over two hundred fifty years of the U.S. presidency. To the beat of the music, pictures of the various presidents and incidents in their lives flashed onscreen–going from paintings/etchings to black-and-white photographs to color photos as the years progressed. In the last moments, there was a picture of Jimmy Carter…and then, on the final cymbal crash, a photo of a smiling, newly-elected Ronald Reagan.
Mason Williams finally posted to YouTube on June 29, 2016 the video for the song “Classical Gas” that I was talking about in my post:
The introduction by Williams says that it contains about 2,500 works of art. My calculations say that it's more like 1,920 works of art. The part of the video that shows the flashing works of art is about 160 seconds long. Assuming that it has 12 works of art per second, as Williams claims, that there are 12 times 160 of them, which equals 1,920.
