Friday, August 15, 2008

Music Video Friday: Blind Guardian - "Mr. Sandman"

This week's video in the Friday night spotlight is that for the Blind Guardian rendition of "Mr. Sandman."



The video opens with the members of the band dressed as uniformed women, an obvious play off the Chordettes. This cover of the song, however, is markedly different in every other possible way, namely that it is headbang-able. Certainly, it starts off somewhat sweet, but once the clown comes in, the whole song takes a turn for the hard and rockin'.

Little Billy (we'll just call him Billy because I certainly don't know his actual name) is fast asleep, when a clown pops out of a giant Jack-in-the-box. Why a kid would have any toy that big is beyond me. Do kids that age even play with Jacks-in-boxes? At any rate, the Pandora box of evil clowns has been opened, and apparently, this somehow wakes up Little Billy. He quickly sits upright, just in time to see the Clown with a Billy Idol sneer use his evil powers to slam the windows and doors shut.

The Clown then climbs out of the box and heads for Billy, presumably to eat his soul and see if he "floats." Our hero seems to have defeated the Clown by simply throwing his blanket over the masked menace, but was instead lulled into a false sense of security: for, just moments later, three more clowns come out from a well-lit closet (or closets, there were three sets of doors). The coolest part, though, has to be the strobe lights flashing and confetti falling downwards (at least I think I'm seeing confetti, but correct me if I'm wrong). By far, this must be my favourite cover of this classic song.

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