Intrigue. Relevance to you, to your day. On the first of every month, we bring you an original Hard Taco song, and this digest, a two headed worm of relevance and intrigue.
The first two or three episodes of Wandavision were in black and white, so we tried to reproduce that by having everything in the room be in various shades of grey.
I even painted the fire extinguisher because of COMMITMENT.
We had a neighborhood scene projected onto the window from outside the house.
The highlight was the music videos that would start at the push of a button. We called it VH1da-Vision (as in a mash up of VH1 and Wandavision). If you've been following the Hard Taco Digest, you know that I had already released 9 of these videos between February and April of 2021. We made 7 more just for the room. Here are the previously unpublished videos, now restored to full color:
I put a lot of effort into trying to make mediocre performances sound good and fake instruments sound real. For this song, I went the extra mile to try to make it sound bad again. Surprisingly, it is much harder to make something sound under-produced than to make it sound over-produced. Go figure.
We made a few more Marvel-themed parodies this month, and I want to take a minute to complain about this first one, "We Didn't Stop with Hydra," which is exactly what the world needs... another parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
This is arguably the crown jewel of the VH1da-Vision catalog, and it is also represents one of my lowest moments in the last year.
Allow me to expose the magnitude of my shame. First off, I couldn't take on this project until I finished watching all the Marvel superhero films and Disney+ shows. So that alone was probably 50 hours of research. On top of that, I spent close to 15 hours working on the lyrics, and about 30 hours recording the music and editing the video, most of which was spent finding and trimming movie clips from YouTube.
So in the middle of this pointlessly backbreaking effort, I went to YouTube to find a clip from the original Billy Joel video. The second thing that came up in response to my search was "Avengers: Endgame Cast Sings We Didn't Start the Fire."
And my heart dropped into my pelvis.
Jimmy Fallon and his Tonight Show flunkies did a video parody of the same song... about the same thing. Not only that, but they had the the actual Avengers cast singing it. And here I am, countless hours deep into my own sad version which, by the way, does not feature original singing and dancing by Robert Downey Jr. and Paul Rudd.
And I'd like to go on record at this point to mention that I have always hated the original song, so humming the melody in my head over and over again was already a kind of torture.
So now I had a choice. I could throw in the proverbial towel (knowing that the most poignant proverbs are about towels), hang my poor head in shame, or...
I could make the best damn Avengers-themed parody... no, the Best. Damn. Overall. Parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire" that the world has seen in 30 years.
This was going to be a big lift, but a journey of a thousand towels starts with one towel. The problem is, some hack publishes a new spoof of "We Didn't Start the Fire" every 90 minutes or so. There are versions about Star Wars, Star Trek, Donald Trump, video games, Manga, SpongeBob, The Simpsons, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and even My Little Pony (I'm serious). And, of course, there are countless versions trying to encapsulate world events not covered in the original song. Somebody even wrote a meta-parody about how often the song is parodied.
It's like the Aristocrats joke. Everyone in this business has to do a version, and every version makes you feel awful in a completely different way.
So here is mine. Let me know if you agree it is the best ever. If I can get 10 views on YouTube, I will know I will consider that a victory.
And here are the other two we did this month. I defy all you My Little Pony fans to create fan-art to the tune of "Two Princes" and "Milkshake," even if they do sound like good names for ponies.
I never thought I'd miss the hustle and bustle, until all we had was hustle. But after a long bustle-free year, it's finally starting to feel like we are on the home stretch. Inch by inch, we are returning to the places, people, and activities that we have missed, and it's exhilarating. It's like starting to walk again after your broken foot has been in a boot. It's tentative at first, but you know that you'll be able to run again soon, and just hope that your body remembers how. The new Hard Taco song, "When I Smell the Barn," tries to capture this sense of anticipation.
My family and I have continued to work on Marvel movie-themed parody videos. While I stand firmly against all flavors of musical snobbery, the parody is undoubtedly the bottom rung of on the ladder of musical artistry. It is the lyrical equivalent of the Dad Joke, often equally worthy of a groan as a chuckle. But like a good Dad Joke, it is easily accessible and may be enjoyed more than once. I'm particularly proud of this first one, whose thumbnail image speaks to its... accessibility.
The Hard Taco song for March is called "Scrapbooking." Lauren and I dipped our toes in the gluey waters of decorative album-making when Scarlett was a bambino. We bought a poofy scrapbook, scissors that made triangular cuts, and plenty of fungible sticker letters. Each garish page told a different chapter in the story of Scarlett's journey from energetic fetus to meconium-coated newborn to chubby cherub in a portable bathtub.
Fifteen years later, I can't remember if this was supposed to be ironic or not. It is certainly cute, and I love revising the baby pictures. I just can't tell how earnest we were when we labelled one of the pages LOUNGIN' or when we made a tiny green envelope to hold part of her umbilical stump. The song "Scrapbooking" imagines where we would be today if we kept going down that rabbit hole.
But this month, we are introducing a new endeavor that is, in some ways, akin to scrapbooking. It's called VH1da-Vision. The title is a mash-up between the music video channel VH1 and WandaVision, the Marvel superhero show that pays homage to several decades of sitcom tropes. VH1da-Vision imagines a channel that plays music videos from different eras, all of which are actually Marvel-themed parodies. Just go with it.
So to kick things off, we have two videos. "Wanda Wall" sets the stage, and "A Jericho, Idiot" harkens to the opening scenes of the first MCU movie, Iron Man. Enjoy!
