Anyone who is anyone should have realised that the weird as all get out movie was based on the weird as all get out musical from 1981; which in turn was based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Eliot's book of poetry has nothing to do with the weird as all get out concept of the cat afterlife.
What I don't understand is why anyone thought it would be any different considering that in 1987, Andrew Lloyd-Webber produced the equally weird as all get out musical Starlight Express¹, which is about steam trains and has the players on roller-skates for the entire production. I dare anyone to name a weirder than all get out character in the entire of film, theatre, television and radio, than 'The City of Milton Keynes'.
But all of this is a digression by way of a less weird thing which I had totally forgotten about.
Grab your Doctor's Sausage, Piroshki, and a jar of Mayonez; and put on your Ushanka and Adidas shell suit for that other project that Andrew Lloyd-Webber did.
Коробе́йники - Korobeiniki (literally 'The Peddlers') is a 13 verse folk song which has a peddler and a young girl, engaged in a battle of haggling over the wares that they sell, in a giant metaphor for their courtship and presumably skoodilypooping². Everyone else in the world who isn't Russian, will of course know this music from the 1989 edition of Tetris on Nintendo's Game Boy as the Type A music.
Cut forward two years and Game Boy Tetris became so big that Andrew Lloyd-Webber and his cast recording producer Nigel Wright, sampled and remixed Type A under licence; under the pseudonym Doctor Spin to release the song simply known as 'Tetris'.
This had lodged itself somewhere in my mind and I was only reminded of this, when someone on Twitter asked the question - why doesn't Andrew Lloyd-Webber do something normal? This is that normal thing and given that it came out in 1992 during the middle of Eurodance and made it to number 6 in the UK charts, seems like the most normal thing that Lloyd-Webber could have done.
I however can not think of this song with the lyrics that Korobeiniki originally had, for I am not Russian, and instead think of the lyrics from Pig with the Face of a Boy's 2010 song 'Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris'.
Long live Stalin, he loves you. Sing these words, or you know what he'll do.
Still, the 'Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris' and even remixing video game music which itself is taken from a Russian is still many or orders of magnitude less weird as all get out than the idea of a musical about the cat afterlife.
¹which itself asks the obvious question - Are you real? Yes or No.
²As if you don't know what that is.
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