Video Sunday: The Sweet, the Profane, and the Owl Pellets (not necessarily in that order)

I was originally going to lead off this with one today. Then I decided it needed some context. Do you remember when comedian Michael Ian Black wrote the picture book Chicken Cheeks? For the record, it is the first celebrity children’s book to my knowledge that has ever cracked NYPL’s 100 Books for Reading and Sharing List. But that’s not important. The point is that he advertised his book with a very funny, cynical, adult video over at Funny or Die (it appears to be gone now, or I’d link to it).

FYI, the music for that was performed by Raina’s buds in the band Harry and the Potters.  Small world.

That was Example A of my comics-make-better-trailers theory.  Now check out Example B.

Thanks to Aaron Zenz for the link!

And finally, this isn’t entirely off-topic, but I worried that if I posted it too early in this piece that it might melt your brain.  When I was a kid, children’s programming was still heavily influenced by strides made in the late 1960s and 70s.  These days, entertainment for children has grown a bit. . . soft, let’s say.  Not universally.  But generally I think that this is true.  So when I see children’s programming that shakes things up a bit, I pay attention.  And if the shorts on Sesame Street I watched as a kid were influenced musically by disco (and they often were) what are we to make of a science video about owl pellets that is CLEARLY influenced by music from the mid-90s?