The Flaming Lips’ “Waitin’ For a Superman” now with Superman!

In the mid-‘90s, before the term “mash-ups” went mainstream, somebody had the idea to sync the movie “The Wizard of Oz” with the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon. The myth goes that if you hit play on Dark Side right on the MGM lion’s third roar, the movie and the album go together perfectly - the lyrics, music, action, and cutting all fall in line, as if it was originally planned that way by the band.

Of course, it wasn’t, but the idea of synching music to movies is appealing to me even if I’ve rarely found any examples that really work. One I think that does, I thought up sometime in the last 15 years – synch The Flaming Lips’s “Waiting For Superman” with the scene in the 1978 Richard Donner movie “Superman” in which the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic nighttime flight. If you can forgive the crappy VHS quality of the movie clip, the song fits the scene quite well, I think - check it out:

Nice, huh? At one time I played around with syncing a scene from Oliver Stone’s “JFK” to the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar, but I’m not sure I want to unveil that just yet. Maybe next year for the Kennedy assassination’s 50th anniversary! Yeah, that’d be classy.

More later...