Talky Bookends: Difference between revisions

 

Repeat showings of the videos tend to quietly cut out the Talky Bookends, particularly if they go on too long.

* [[Michael Jackson]]'s "Thriller", which is about fourteen minutes long, was the [[Trope Codifier]]; it's about five minutes before we get to the song. From that point onward, many of his bigger videos had these, to the point that they could run upwards of ten minutes (he preferred they be called short films). After their initial airings they were usually trimmed to just the song portion.

** "Bad": The setup establishes that Michael's character is an inner-city youth who was able to attend a private school, and when he returns to his old neighborhood, his former gangmates want him to prove he's still tough. When he cannot bring himself to rob an old man in the subway, the resultant challenge from the leader leads into the song; the full-length version ends with the leader accepting that he's still tough, but in a way that does not require violence to prove it. Keep in mind that this video is ''18 minutes long'' and the song takes up a good five on its own.

** "Black or White": Macaulay Culkin's playing his music too loud, and when dad George Wendt objects, he gets blasted out of the house in retaliation. The infamous closing segment is an extended, music-less dance piece for Michael that features a lot of crotch-grabbing and property-smashing.

** "Remember the Time": In ancient Egypt the pharaoh's wife is bored, and he isn't happy to discover that the only performer brought to entertain her turns out to be her former lover Michael.

** "You Rock My World": Circa the 1930s, Michael and his buddy Chris Tucker pursue a pretty woman into a mob-run club whose leader is played by [[Marlon Brando]].

* An odd [[Performance Video]] example: The sequence of the Eagles warming up before "Hotel California".

* Nickel Creek's video for "Smoothie Song," an instrumental piece, is of the band playing the song at an instrument shop. The ending shows the band returning the instruments after finishing the song.

* The video for [[Lady Gaga]]'s "Paparazzi" starts with a three-minute long sequence where her boyfriend throws her off a balcony while photographers watch, and has a brief intermission where she gets back by poisoning him (and [[No Such Thing As Bad Publicity|telephoning a confession to the police]]).

** "Marry The Night" has 8 minutes of pre music video discussion before the song starts...

* This trope (along with [[Mid Vid Skit|Mid Vid Skits]], fandom specific [[Easter Egg|easter eggs]], and the occasional credits sequence) is the reason why most 30 Seconds to Mars videos are longer than the songs themselves. The worst offender is "Hurricane"; the song is 6 minutes long, the full video is 13 minutes long. The video was originally intended to be ''20 minutes long''. [[Serial Escalation|And who knows how long the tie-in videos they intended to release afterwords were going to be.]]

* Night Ranger did a short-lived series of bookends in which they were stranded on an island, with a radio DJ commenting that the band is missing. The individual videos were implied to be all in the castaways' minds, as they relived their pasts and/or longed to get back and take up whatever romance they'd left behind.

* Barnes & Barnes' "Fish Heads" video begins with a long sequence where a man buys a fish head from a fishmonger, walks down the street and unwraps it next to a hobo played by Dr. Demento.

** Said song is a remix of "Windowlicker" itself. As of 2011 it hasn't been released.

* The Gregg Allman Band's "I'm No Angel" starts with the band pulling up to an abandoned old tavern and telling an old man sitting on the porch to fix the flat tire on their car. The song then starts when the band sets up to play inside the tavern, which comes to life with a group of immoderately attractive female outlaws. The video ends with the band leaving the building and getting back to their car. The old man shows Gregg the lawman's badge that caused the flat; Gregg makes it quite clear he wants no part of the badge, since {{spoiler|during the song, he becomes a lawman who is hanged by those female outlaws}}.