Every Thursday on The Right Hook, George is joined live in studio by Bill Hughes, who fills in the musical blindspot in the presenter’s cultural awareness with music, while the pair discuss what was going on in the world during this calendar week one year in history. Tune in live at 6.30pm or listen back on the show’s podcasts.
On this evening’s show, Bill plays the hits of early May, 2000. Ireland was caught in the middle of the 10-week-long chart domination by Mark McCabe’s Maniac 2000, while Britney Spears was rocking up another hit with Oops!... I Did it Again.
Much has been made of the song’s video, a retro futuristic pastiche of space travel that sees Britney dressed in a red leather jumpsuit while completing some choreography on Mars. At the end of the video, her astronaut paramour reveals he’d made his way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to reclaim the diamond necklace tossed into the icy water at the end of Titanic, James Cameron’s unsinkable box-office classic.
If you ask people about the video, the Heart of the Ocean skit at the end is the most likely thing they’ll remember, with even NASA Curiosity Rover tweeting to Britney about it from the Martian surface.
@britneyspears Hey Brit Brit. Mars is still looking good. Maybe someday an astronaut will bring me a gift, too. Drill bits crossed ;)
— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 15, 2012
The vision of Spears performing her boxy moves dressed entirely in red vinyl is one of the popstar’s most iconic looks, but the 15th anniversary of the song has seen one YouTube channel recreate the video in a way you’ve never seen it before.
Mario Wienerroither, whose channel has become one-to-watch after catapulting him to heady heights of viral stardom in just a few short months, sees music videos and opening-credit sequences ripped of all their music, leaving only the vocals, and adding in the kind of sound effects audio producers would normally remove. The final results, as Spears squeaks around the set and the flames poof poof behind her.
Granted, there’s not ‘Heart of the Ocean’ payoff at the end, but there’s a bellyful of laughs along the way. Check out the video below:
