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YOUTUBE HALL OF FAME

YouTube HOF: These Are Not the Superheroes You're Looking For

By Grantland staff at

"Batdance"

Prince - Batdance by val6210

Alex Pappademas: The thing that genuinely saddens me about the era of carefully quality-controlled fan-service-calibrated superhero-movie-making/marketing is that we'll never get another "Batdance." Kitschy, shrieky, underratedly funky, thoroughly off-message in terms of the dark, brooding post–Frank Miller vision of the movie it was nominally cross-promoting, basically unconcerned with Batman and/or the Joker except as a metaphor for Prince's own desire to be two different people so he could sleep with five Kim Basinger lookalikes at once (and then blow up an electric chair), this code-black spoiler alert in the form of a housequake was as inexplicable then as it is unthinkable now. It's hard to even imagine what the contemporary equivalent would be — a Nicki Minaj Avengers song that made incoherent sample-salad of half the dialogue from Joss Whedon's script, I guess, with Nicki strutting around in the video dressed as a half-Loki/half–Iron Man sex-imp — and harder to imagine the person who signed off on it not getting fired, or institutionalized.

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