Some context: I love looking up old advertisement compilations on YouTube. There’s a million of them, they all have like 6000 views each and they’re fantastic to put on in the background. For a good time, just search “CM” followed by any year from like 1981-1992.
That process led me to find, clip and tweet the following:
The clip (which you can see in full here) is from a series of adverts George Lucas did as the pitchman for Panasonic. In the clip, Lucas talks about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics accompanied by some very early 90s morph transitions, the kind made famous by Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video.
There are just so many things about it I love: the soft music, the bold narration (someone on Twitter suggested it was Fumihiko Tachiki, the voice actor of Gendo Ikari) over Lucas’ Kermit The Frog whispering. But of course, the most important part is the horrible half-camcorder, half-director Animorph that is Lucas. It’s some Videodrome shit, a chimera of tape and flesh, and frankly I love it.
Lucas apparently did a bunch more, including one where he’s in the middle of a field being applauded by his own creations. Did he die? Is this Elysium for film dorks? The world may never know.