I would turn and then the suit would turn like a half-second later.”
So you kind of got the gist of what I was doing. It was pretty old-school, but it looked great. Back then, that wasn’t a viable option, so I had to have latex bladders glued to my cheeks and I had a team of my visual-effects people blowing through tubes, which ran down my shirt and my pants and onto the floor. If I were to do the ‘Fat’ video now, it would be a fairly simple job in CGI to have my face expand from normal to huge. I also remember that these were late-’80s special effects. I was able to hire plus-size dancers, which you’d think you wouldn’t be able to find pretty readily, but in Los Angeles, you can find virtually anything you need. Thankfully, Michael Jackson let me use his subway set, which had not been struck yet it was still on a soundstage in Culver City. As I was watching the video, I just imagined an 800-pound version of myself trying to get through the turnstiles on a subway, and I thought before the video was over, okay, I am doing this. Since I had already done ‘Eat It,’ it seemed like a natural sequel. “The very first time that I saw the ‘Bad’ video on TV, I had the epiphany that ‘Fat’ was a pretty obvious parody idea for me. So at one point in the video you see me shaking a bowling pin as fast as I can, hoping that nobody would realize.” At one point I was supposed to be shaking maracas, and nobody had remembered to bring maracas, so I grabbed the closest thing that resembled maracas, which was a bowling pin. It really was lacking in not only production but in proper preparation. We shot it in somebody’s house in the San Fernando Valley. We made it for a couple thousand dollars. The ‘Ricky’ video had very low production value. So it was relatively easy to get played on MTV because they would play anything that wasn’t overtly horrible. The thing about MTV was it was a 24-hour music-video channel that started back when people weren’t making music videos, so they needed product to fill the pipeline. It was when my first album came out, which was right after MTV debuted.
Prior to the release of the new album, Weird Al rang up Vulture to reminisce about shooting a few of his earlier videos, from his debut, “Ricky,” all the way up to “Perform This Way.” On top of that, Yankovic is also a world-class music-video artist, and with Mandatory Fun, he’ll team up with Funny or Die, Nerdist, College Humor, and others to debut eight music videos in eight days.
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Over the last three decades, he’s parodied everyone from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, starred in two TV shows - one of which included a theme song about Al living in the sewer with a hamster - and, perhaps most impressively, made playing the accordion cool ( you’re welcome, Accordion USA News). The listening experience is much more pleasurable than it sounds, which is not surprising for a musician who has become the definitive musical satirist of our generation. Don’t be intimidated by the Orwellian directive behind Weird Al Yankovic’s new album title, Mandatory Fun.
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