Sunday, September 26, 2010

"My Baby Just Cares for Me"

Surfing the internet I saw this great clay animation of Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios. It is an Academy Award-winning British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is famous for its stop-motion, clay animation productions, particularly those featuring Plasticine duo Wallace & Gromit.



"My Baby Just Cares for Me" is a jazz standard written by Walter Donaldson with lyrics by Gus Kahn. It was written for the 1930 film version of the 1928 Ziegfeld musical comedy Whoopee!, starring Eddie Cantor. It is known as the signature tune of singer and pianist Nina Simone (Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), better known by her stage name Nina Simone). Simone recorded the song in 1958 for her debut album, Little Girl Blue. The track remained relatively obscure until 1987, when it was used in a UK television commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume.

To follow up this exposure, the track was released as a single by Charly Records, entering the UK Singles Chart on October 31, 1987 and becoming, at Number 5, one of Simone's biggest hits almost nineteen years after her previous chart entry. This single also made the top 10 in several European single charts and peaked at number one in the Dutch Top 40. A claymation music video was produced by Aardman Animations and directed by Peter Lord.

Most know our club tune is "Sledgehammer" song by Peter Gabriel.
I picked that song because of the first part of the song:

You could have a steam train
If you'd just lay down your T.R.A.C.S.
You could have an aeroplane flying
If you bring your blue sky back

The video of "Sledgehammer" spawned a widely popular and influential music video directed by Stephen R. Johnson. Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. In 1987, it won nine MTV Video Music Awards, a record which still stands as of 2010. It ranked at number four on MTV's 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made (1999). MTV later announced that "Sledgehammer" is the most played music video in the history of the station. "Sledgehammer" has also been declared to be MTV's number one animated video of all time.

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