The tribute album, Muppets: The Green Album, will be out next week!

Dirty Dancing (1987) is an iconic and enormously influential film, now scheduled for a remake, directed by the choreographer of the original film.  (We will not discuss the awful sequel, though you should listen to “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me’s” Peter Sagel tell his story about it how he accidentally sort of wrote it.)  Jezebel called “Dirty Dancing” the greatest movie of all time.  The Jewish publication The Tablet has a piece by Stephanie Butnick called “Is Dirty Dancing the Most Jewish Film Ever?”

She is speaking of cultural Judaism rather than theological or spiritual Judaism.  Butnick says:

A week ago, I told Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of the incredibly popular film Dirty Dancing, that when I first saw the film years ago, I hadn’t realized how heavily influenced it was by Jewish culture. She beamed, as she had the entire evening, and assured me it was a seriously Jewish movie. So Jewish, in fact, that none of the characters ever need to explicitly mention their Jewishness—they’re spending the summer at Kellerman’s resort in the Catskills, after all, and, Bergstein pointed out proudly, milk and meat are never served in the same scene. It’s a Jewish film, she explained, “if you know what you’re looking at.”

…

Calling Dirty Dancing “a very American film,” Bergstein described it as the story of a young girl who took her life in her hands and ran with it, no matter what it cost her. (As Carmon helpfully contextualized long before the screening, “The daughter of the first generation of American Jews to read widespread upper-middle class prosperity, if not elite cultural acceptance, she is swathed in a pre-Kennedy assassination liberalism.”)

 

Time Magazine has a great list of the best music videos in the first three decades of MTV.  It’s hard to believe now that MTV’s arrival was controversial because some people thought it would take away from the purity of audio-only enjoyment of music.  It was more appropriately controversial because, incredibly, MTV overlooked black performers in its early days.  But videos from the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, became among the most popular ever and its “Yo! MTV Raps” program was influential in the genre’s early days.

I’ve been watching MTV long enough to remember when their “we’ll try anything” attitude had them playing Madonna’s “True Blue” for 24 hours straight (as the VJ noted, it could have been worse — it could have been “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida“).  That means I remember the days when it really was “music television” with music videos back-to-back.

Music videos have turned out to be as creative and boundary-shattering as the music that inspires them.  Time has some of my favorites, including “A-Ha’s” great “Take On Me,” Peter Gabriel’s amazing “Sledgehammer,” Jamiroquai’s mind-bending “Virtual Insanity,” Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” featuring a sensational dance performance from Christopher Walken, OK Go’s treadmill dance number in “Here It Goes Again,” and, of course, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” probably the two most famous videos of all time.

Here are a few of my favorites they missed:

Robert Rodriguez told me that his favorite gadget in the new “Spy Kids” movie is the robot dog with the voice of Ricky Gervais.  Here’s a closer look.