Trapped in the Drive-Thru!

[algonacchick]

You would, Stephen.

This should be good.

[The Doctor]

The true meaning behind the song Pancreas

[Big Spoon]

Over-analyzing much?

[just2good]

Why did Doogtoons remove the video on their channel? It was there last week. 26,000,000 views gone!

[Killingsworth]

Maybe because Al or his label wanted it on the alyankovicVEVO channel?

[weird user]

In an Ask Al about this video, Al mentions that there was no budget for a 14-minute-long live action music video. It makes me wonder how they were able to get one animated, since I hear about animation being so expensive (presumably more than live action). After all, in animated movies, it's rare for there to be fully animated deleted scenes (Ive seen an article on Who Framed Roger Rabbit that deleting even a few seconds of animation is like wasting thousands of dollars). Was this animated in a special way that allowed less budget?

For years, I thought that long songs like Albuquerque wouldn't have music videos because of their length, mainly because that'd limit the number of times they'd play on music video stations more than because of budget. But this song did get a music video. Had Trapped at the Drive-Thru ever aired on TV? I'm guessing no, but I could be surprised.

[TMBJon]

An animated video like TIDT does not cost anything close to the equivalent cost if Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc were animating a video of similar length. Those studios have teams of animators working on scenes for years at a time. In the case of Trapped, the video was animated by one guy in Flash. (Flash has no costs and there would be no loss if Al decided to delete a scene or have the artist change it significantly, other than the animator's time.) There would have been essentially zero hard costs for this video, maybe a hard drive. So the cost came down to how much the animator charged Al to do the project. I am guessing he did it for a greatly reduced rate because 1) Al appeared on his DoogToons show, 2) the guy is obviously a big fan of Al's.

Meanwhile, a live action video of this length would require several days of production, which in turn means hiring, paying, and feeding an entire union crew for several weeks (pre- and post-production, too!).

[LaikaComeHome]

This song is lyrically genius, I feel like I don't give it enough love. Love the music video, also animated by the people who animated little snippets of podcasts with Al talking about his "childhood."

[LaikaComeHome]

I showed one of my friends this video and she loved it. Though she was half awake at the part with the car radio and it woke her up!

[spmahn]

So, given everything that's been in the news these past few weeks and given the new allegations against R Kelly that have come to light, do you think this is a track that Al tries to quietly bury going forward, if for no other reason than to ensure that Kelly doesn't benefit from any future royalties as a co-writer? Granted, I seriously doubt the song generates much in the way of revenue, but given everything that has been said at this point, anything even remotely connected to R Kelly is probably not the best look. I dunno if Al should go so far as to pull the track from any future reprints of the album, but I could see him maybe pulling it from his official Youtube channel eventually if R Kelly continues to get bad press or worse, and maybe removing from Spotify / Itunes / any other music outlet.