A little nonsense

I ran across this this afternoon. Pony Poka Poka.




I nominate this for the new Rickroll video to link to.

(I think it has something to do with a video game where you hammer on stuff.)

Also, Poka Poka is NOT the same thing as Polka Polka. But there exist such things, in fact there exist a number of them because apparently someone has taken most of Weird Al's polka-medly compilations and found clips from the show that kind-of-sort-of work for the words. Or if they don't work, they're amusingly inappropriate. At least if you're a fan of the show:



I admit I have great love for Weird Al's polka medleys, because of the way I think he skewers pop music that sometimes takes itself a bit too seriously by inserting funny sounds (Predictably, he uses a flatulence sound occasionally) and where he inserts common "tropes" from polkas (I guess you'd call them motives?) so you hear a little snippet of "Too Fat Polka" or similar in the middle of some angry pop song.

(And I confess. Some of the songs, like Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" sound BETTER to me in polka form. What can I say? I grew up in the Cleveland radio market and until I was in college thought every city of any size had at least one radio station that played polka music and broadcast in Polish or Slavic for part of the day)

Here's the polka medley from his most recent album:



One of the things I love about Weird Al is how clever and creative he is with his parodies (and things like stitching together all those disparate songs and making it work; that's not easy and probably requires a lot of transposition and bridging between keys) . But I also have to give credit to the people who put these videos together, finding the right bits of footage. (I laughed and clapped over several of the bits in this one - Pinkie doing "Call me Maybe" to Cranky!.)

Also, this one's particularly appropriate because it has Weird Al Pony ("Cheese Sandwich," the party pony).

The especially wonderful thing, I think, about Weird Al is how many people said he'd essentially be a flash in the pan - hit it big with one or two parodies and then be forgotten. But he's still going, and in a lot of cases, longer than the acts he started out to parody....

(And there's even a second version of this, with some different clips, by someone else....)