Animal: "MR. BLUE SKY. MR. BLUE SKY? HEY MISTER BLUE SKY!!!!!!!!!!!!"

October 27, 2021 5:23 PM

"Mr. Blue Sky," by the Electric Light Orchestra Mayhem, with particular focus on Zoot (hey, there, Mr. Blue).

Somehow, perfectly, wonderfully, they have Animal doing the syncopated breaths!

posted by MollyRealized (39 comments total)

the jeff lynn rerecord is having a bit of a renaissance. i heard it blasting in the background when i called my 19yo, even.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:35 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

also...ann-eee-maaal. good link.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:35 PM on October 27, 2021

Yeah, that's super cute. I dearly love the Electric Mayhem, and this is such a joyful evocation of their energy.
posted by prismatic7 at 6:09 PM on October 27, 2021 [4 favorites]

Haven't WTFV, but...

I know most of ELO's oeuvre,having grown up in their early days, but not this one. Until my son would search for it in the car. Think he must have heard on the Guardians soundtrack. It's a good song.
posted by Windopaene at 6:22 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

OK, I have WTFV...

Better than I could have expected!
posted by Windopaene at 6:25 PM on October 27, 2021

man, I really loved that guitar solo...
posted by rebent at 6:46 PM on October 27, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is good!

I, too, discovered ELO because of guardians.
posted by freethefeet at 6:49 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have always aspired to be Zoot.

However I take exception to this, from the second link in TFA:

One of Zoot's trademarks is blowing small notes of music at a time. He notably blew the final note of "The Muppet Show Theme" in the closing credits on every episode of The Muppet Show

That was categorically and emphatically not a "small" note!! Hrumpph.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:53 PM on October 27, 2021 [5 favorites]

I’ve long wondered why Disney doesn’t do a live-action Electric Mayhem show at the parks. I would love to see the good doctor and the rest of the gang in person.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:56 PM on October 27, 2021 [7 favorites]

I discovered ELO from the (underrated) 1996 Farrelly Brothers bowling comedy Kingpin, whose soundtrack featured several of their songs. (Before that, I was only familiar with Don’t Bring Me Down.) After seeing the movie, I went right out and bought a greatest hits CD, which is chock-full of absolute bangers. This song quickly became a favorite.
posted by Atom Eyes at 7:27 PM on October 27, 2021

Eldorado is a desert island disc for me, and well worth checking out if you want to scratch a little deeper on 70's lushly-orchestrated concept albums.

Mr. Blue Sky's not on it, but I like it too, and this was a fun video!
posted by dragstroke at 7:35 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

I knew some ELO as a teen, but only discovered Mr. Blue Sky when it was used in the very clever trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004
posted by tzikeh at 7:48 PM on October 27, 2021

This was great, though I'm still having a hard time adjusting to the "new" Floyd Pepper voice. I guess I just have to watch more "new" Muppets.
posted by KingEdRa at 7:50 PM on October 27, 2021

The new Kermit is terrible. Steve Whitmire was at least close. The new one just sounds wrong.

This was good though. Anything that makes Disney realize they need to do more Muppets.
posted by downtohisturtles at 7:55 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Disney’s got all that goddamn money and they can’t even bother to hire real horn players.

could’ve at least bothered to do a two-voice horn arrangement that sounded like a trumpet and a saxophone, rather than obviously someone playing a MIDI keyboard and a generic sax sample dropped in at the very end
posted by Jon_Evil at 9:00 PM on October 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

I got into the song via Eternal Sunshine, too. And the Polyphonic Spree via the same soundtrack. Like Reservoir Dogs, I suspect more people I know had the CD than watched the movie.
posted by Foaf at 9:44 PM on October 27, 2021

garden state ^^^
posted by j_curiouser at 10:15 PM on October 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

The vocoder looks and sounds a little like something one might run into in a hospital.
Would recommend "The Story of Mr Blue Sky" which talks about how the song was created - it is part of a longer "Concerto for a rainy day".
posted by rongorongo at 11:00 PM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Not a vocoder, it's a talk box what Peter Framptom uses
posted by mbo at 1:00 AM on October 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

The new Kermit is terrible. Steve Whitmire was at least close. The new one just sounds wrong.

And here I was thinking that Matt Vogel seems to be settling nicely into the role after some rough initial outings, a credit to a talented young Muppeteer who was thrust abruptly into the spotlight upon Whitmire's unceremonious ousting. How foolish of me. But I suppose I must accede to your objective correctness.

Anyway, did you see Janice's awesome fretwork during her guitar solo? I love her! She's so cool!
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:17 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

For years (I found this song through the long-form VW Beetle Convertible ad) I thought the vocoder at the end was saying “Mis-ter Blue-Sky ay”

Then this summer I picked up the LP. It’s the last song on side 3. So it says “Please turn me over”
posted by hwyengr at 7:22 AM on October 28, 2021

Y'all are making me feel really effing old right now, seeing as how I discovered ELO wayyy back when they were brand new.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:02 AM on October 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Hey you with the pretty face
Welcome to the human race
A celebration, Mr. Blue Sky's up there waitin'
And today is the day we've waited for

This bit always makes me think of my son and the whole thing is so joyful it make the immediate area very dusty every time.


But also. When I rented a house with roommates in my 20s I discovered that if I drank enough to feel the spins and then drank a full glass of water before going to bed I could wake up 4-5 hours later feeling like a million bucks. My roommates....did not feel that good.

I always wanted to blast this song through the house while playing the cow-bell parts really loud. It perfectly captures how I'd feel on waking while also being a reflection of how I made everyone else feel just a bit more hung over because of how good I felt.
posted by VTX at 8:10 AM on October 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Y'all are making me feel really effing old right now, seeing as how I discovered ELO wayyy back when they were brand new.

I discovered ELO from the radio on my plastic stereo that I used to play the 45s I bought with my allowance. I also had to sing their songs in Grade 7 vocal music class. Groos set me up with an early hint that somethings in life would never be satisfactorily explained.
posted by srboisvert at 8:13 AM on October 28, 2021

I know most of ELO's oeuvre, having grown up in their early days, but not this one.

I. . . You . . . What?? I mean I'm super dead old, and like the other fogies in the thread I was buying ELO records back when they first came out (at Discomat, when my sister took me up there because she wanted to go to Alexander's - 1970s NYC represent). I can't claim to have been the hip kid who had heard their early albums -- I was and am the opposite of cool. But Out of the Blue was huge. Basically, if you were the kind of kid who had records, you had that record. And the two singles I remember being absolutely everywhere were Turn to Stone and Mr. Blue Sky. I can't imagine knowing ELO -- or even knowing the genre at all -- and not knowing that song. What an awesome surprise it must have been to discover it!
posted by The Bellman at 8:35 AM on October 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm not thrilled by Zoot's sax playing in this, but man that was an expressive puppeteering performance.
posted by Quasirandom at 8:57 AM on October 28, 2021

This was good.
ELO had a big renaissance during the 70s revival in downtown NYC in the 1990s. They seem to be one of those bands that keep getting more popular with age and further into the mainstream-they deserve it, the music is innovative and inspiring.
posted by Liquidwolf at 9:44 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

FWIW, there's regional band here in Indiana that does a ton of ELO covers. They actually have violin/viola/cello players in the band.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:46 AM on October 28, 2021

I loved this, it's a great combo of a happy song with the perfect Muppet characters performing their parts.
Eldorado is my special album, and I'm miffed I can't find my original vinyl at the moment. We used to play the intro, and the beginning of "Funeral for a Friend" from GoodBye Yellow Brick Road, as our creepy Halloween house music. So both albums have pretty intense scratches on those tracks. That was from long away days, when you'd rummage through albums for anything spooky because we didn't have any actual spooky music albums. I think parts of Brain Salad Surgery got played, too.
posted by winesong at 10:47 AM on October 28, 2021

Zoot's little Birkenstocks are making me so happy.
posted by stevil at 11:45 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

This was (er, the ELO original) among the first ever gift record albums I ever received. I wanted it for Turn to Stone and also for the cardboard spaceship.
posted by notyou at 11:49 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I learned about ELO when they were on Top 40 radio, like the rest of the olds did.

This is one of my all-time favorite songs. I like the horn section!
posted by kirkaracha at 12:31 PM on October 28, 2021

This was great, but The Mayhem's take on Jungle Boogie is still my fave. especially sam the eagle's parts.
posted by hearthpig at 4:26 PM on October 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

The talk box should've been Tom Servo.
posted by Reverend John at 7:30 PM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

In 2016, Jeff Lynne (retaining an enviably "muppet interpretation ready" hairdo) and the rest of ELO Performed this live version of Mr Blue Sky to rain drenched audience at Glastonbury. Note the authentic deployment of fire-extinguisher.
posted by rongorongo at 5:41 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was working as a barback at a cocktails-on-draft bar at Outside Lands 2016, schlepping pony kegs of batched mixology from Scotty at the filling station out back up to the squirt-guns out front.

It was a whole lot of festival work, and not all of it going smoothly for… reasons.

On my lunch break Saturday, I just walked away from the bar and sat down on the edge of Polo Fields, with the main stage about football field away. I planned to just sit there and… not be at the bar.

Then this happened.

And everything was OK, got back on the horse, and rode it with my crew through the rest of the weekend.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:07 PM on October 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

I rediscovered ELO when they used Twilight for the opening of the Densha Otoko drama series. Which itself was a homage to the opening of Daicon IV (and III sort of of).
posted by LostInUbe at 4:18 AM on October 30, 2021

wtf have they done to my girl Janice?!

Why does she suddenly have a GINORMOIS Uvula and also gums underneath her teeth?

What prompted this unspeakable redesign ?
posted by Faintdreams at 3:18 PM on October 30, 2021

I rediscovered ELO when they used Twilight for the opening of the Densha Otoko drama series. Which itself was a homage to the opening of Daicon IV (and III sort of of).

Thanks for sharing that. The whole Time album - a concept about time travel from the 1980s to 2095 - always seems like something that was crying out for something like a film - musical - or something visual to go with it. I never knew it has been done (looking at the comments for the second video - apparently done without asking ELO whether it would be OK). Enjoy this album before it gets co-opted to push Cybertrucks!
posted by rongorongo at 12:30 AM on October 31, 2021