Fraggles and Sesame Street and Muppet Show alumni. Plus, a talking snowman. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.

This week: A Wish For Wings That Work, the only Berke Breathed TV special ever.

Part two. Part three.

(Posting will be light the next week or so – exams in full swing, etc.)

Rankin-Bass’ The Life And Adventures of Santa Claus, probably the best one they ever did. Parts 2-5 are on Youtube as well.

So the guys who did that Carl Sagan autotune have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, and given their second effort – a mix of Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Feynman and Bill Nye – I’m not sure that extending this into a series necessarily works.

The first song was brilliant for two reasons. First, the tune itself was quite good. But secondly, Carl Sagan’s spoken words worked extraordinarily well for the purpose of Autotuning – his Kermit the Frog voice and deliberate pace of speech turns into Autotuned music much more eloquently than a lot of people’s. And on top of that, Sagan was just a poetic goddamned person, in ways that practically nobody else in the “scientific celebrity” community is. Listening to the attempt to Autotune Bill Nye’s trademark excited exhortations – or a fairly dry statement by Tyson, for that matter – just underlines how much harder it is to Autotune their words into really good music.

So in future: more Sagan, and everybody else is a cameo player, please. Either that, or start Autotuning Beakman’s World.