Vid reveals!

[bironic]

Equinox time! I made two vids for Northern Exposure, a show I hadn't seen until I matched with valoise and couldn't come up with a song idea for the two other fandoms we had in common. I'd been meaning to check it out anyway, since people seemed enthusiastic about Marilyn and a TV reunion that may be in the works, and this provided a good opportunity to finally see what people had been talking about back in youth group in temple.

valoise asked for character studies of Marilyn, Ed or Chris. Clipping six seasons of material for a character study was more than I had energy (or song ideas) for, especially when Marilyn's otherwise awesome deadpan delivery makes for difficult visual storytelling and Chris is such a complex dude, but focusing on one- or two-episode plots felt manageable.

Conveniently, I fell for the brief and bittersweet romance between Marilyn and "Bob" the Flying Man, played by Bill Irwin, a real-life clown college graduate whom you may know as the voice and invisible manipulator of the robot TARS in Interstellar, among other things. The Norah Jones song occurred to me right away, and then Bob came back for a surprise second episode! So there was enough material to do a proper vid. Editing the song down proved trickier than expected because the transitions between verses didn't match, but eventually the pieces slotted into place.


Title: Come Away with Me (AO3)
Song: Norah Jones (edited)
Length: 2:18
Content notes: A man who by choice doesn't speak.
Physical notes: None.
Vidder's notes: This is the sappiest vid I've ever made, and I don't care. I love Marilyn and The Flying Man and you should too.

"Come Away with Me" (Watch on Vimeo)

Come away with me in the night
Come away with me
And I will write you a song

Come away with me and we'll kiss
On a mountaintop
Come away with me
And I'll never stop loving you

And I want to walk with you
On a cloudy day
In fields where the yellow grass grows knee-high
So won't you try to come

To come away with me in the night
Come away with me



I'd had half a mind to do a triptych for valoise by making little treats with Ed, specifically Ed/Rolf, the punk dude with the terrible attempt at a German accent who comes to town to tune an antique clock and hits it off with the guy his own age, and Chris, specifically Chris/the lady whose pets he kept accidentally killing, but I didn't have a song for the former, and I wasn't sure if the latter, which would've been set to "Another One Bites the Dust," aligned with valoise's humor, and you want to be sure about that kind of thing.

Come deadline day, I was really feeling the itch to do something more, both for valoise and to make additional use of all the DVDs I'd watched, heh. I thought of the Blood, Sweat & Tears song with the lines, "You make me so very happy / I'm so glad you came into my life," but while it conveyed the right sentiment, the tone didn't feel right. I realized the music was the wrong genre, and that the right genre was, of course, punk. So I literally just Googled "punk songs," and this one, which had "love" in the title, came up in the first set of featured results. I listened to it, decided it would work if I cut out all the verses, and since I'd already ripped the episode just in case, I was able to make the thing in the three-ish hours that remained until go-live. \o/


Title: Ever Fallen in Love (AO3)
Song: Buzzcocks (edited)
Length: 1:21
Content notes: None
Physical notes: Some flickering light toward the end

"Ever Fallen in Love" (Watch on Vimeo)

Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
You shouldn't have fallen in love with?



I think I broke my own rules about making sure you cut fast enough to match a fast song. But each jump cut meant that much less footage to work with, and less footage would have required the excision of another refrain, which would have been really hard to do with the structure of the end of the song. Given more time, the vid might have been edited better—but then again, I might've fought with it and decided it wasn't good enough to post.

The important thing is there is an Ed/Rolf vid in the world. Considering that the characters only had three scenes together, I think it's pretty good.

(There were no tags for Marilyn/The Flying Man or Ed/Rolf on the AO3! I wonder if there were more back in the day on other sites, now lost to time, or if they were never popular pairings.)

P.S. Ed was the character I'd referred to cryptically in the "Watching" section here. Darren E. Burrows is the son of Billy Drago née William E. Burrows, frequent portrayer of evil hotties. Check it out: Burrows (left) was the spitting image of Drago (right) when they were both young—I gasped in one scene in Northern Exposure where Ed had his hair slicked back and wore a fedora, the resemblance was so strong—yet you'd hardly know it now.

Comments

[jb_slasher]

Oh my god Billy Drago terrified me when I was a kid but now I squee whenever I see him :D

[valoise]

Thanks again for these fantastic vids, they were both so wonderful. Northern Exposure is so rich with fantastic characters. I think Maggie and Joel, and maybe Chris, got lots of attention back in the day but the entire ensemble makes the show one of my favorites of that time.

Side note - the Burrows family came from the same part of Kansas I grew up in. Darren Burroughs was even born in my home town of Winfield.

[moon_custafer]

I missed, and have never yet seen, the Flying Man episode, but heard about it back in the day from my mom, who found it charming. Bill Irwin had an Off-Broadway mime show at the time, I think, but the main thing I’ve seen him in is the live-action Popeye, where he has a background role as Ham Gravy, Olive Oyl’s ex.

[seekingferret]

I've only seen a few episodes of Northern Exposure and didn't really enjoy them, but these are charming vids!

Also, I selfishly want to ask you, since my own brief look didn't yield anything, to please tell me if Joel ever dances.

[selki]

I liked these both so much! Sweet longing in the first, and the joy of meeting of minds in the second.

These are wonderful!

[jesse_the_k]

I was a dedicated Northern Exposure watcher and somehow didn't remember the Marilyn/Flying Man.

/back from an hour down a N.E. rabbit hole. Let me recommend

https://www.moosechick.com

[bironic]

*fire emoji*, yeah?

[bironic]

Hey, cool!

And you are very welcome! I'm glad you like them.

Totally makes sense that Joel and Maggie would have had a lot of fans back when the show was running. Joel's snarkiness didn't age super well, though, I think, against today's dialogues about privilege, although Maggie's feminism sometimes felt more progressive than a lot of today's TV, even if her hair and clothes are firmly rooted in the '90s. :) Personally I got bored by their 'romance' so we were a good match on character interests, you and I.

I think there are more Ed and Marilyn vids in me and maybe an ensemble one about the magical realism, but song ideas are required for the spark, so we'll see if they ever become realized. Had you seen the one ensemble vid on the AO3 before the link went down? I'm sorry to have missed it; it sounds like it was a nice, maybe sentimental overview.

[bironic]

Yyyyyyes? Yes! Google confirms he danced at least once, with his love interest in the bar: https://images.app.goo.gl/Wv6KBnimyxWQMjv49

Glad you liked the vids. I definitely got bored with the show for stretches, especially the Joel/Maggie stuff, but DVD momentum is a powerful force, and I kept going.

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

[bironic]

Sure thing!

It is not for the dancing vid, but do you know about the couple of episodes with the maybe-hallucinated rabbi, the Seder of Fleishmans past, the being swallowed by the whale on Yom Kippur, the nice one where Joel realizes he'd rather have an unrecognized minyan made of townspeople than actual Jews (strangers) fetched from across the Pacific Northwest?

[bironic]

Aw, yay! I'm so glad. Thank you. Both of these couples ("couples" in the second case) were super cute.

Re: These are wonderful!

[bironic]

Ooh, thanks!

Hope you had a good time digging up some internet remnants of the fandom. :)

[bironic]

Ham Gravy - love it. I think Bill Irwin first "popped" to me as an actor I recognized when he played Anne Hathaway's father in Rachel Getting Married. What a lovely face, and, of course, body language.

That's cool that you'd heard about the episode - I guess it made an impression on a lot of people! Me included, heh, so I guess I would have aligned with fandom tastes at least that much when the episodes aired 25 years ago.

[seekingferret]

I knew about some of those episodes, the Jewish-centric episodes were the ones that I tracked down when I gave Northern Exposure a shot.

I personally didn't like Kaddish for Uncle Manny, I would have been okay with the realization that being comforted by his community meant more than having a minyan with strangers who were Jewish, but the realization that he preferred having an invalid minyan made of his community rather than a minyan with strangers was unsatisfying for me... it seemed to ignore the fact that this was a thing he was doing For Uncle Manny, not just for himself. And the episode, as I recall, also didn't show Joel being particularly graceful about letting the strangers, who sacrificed time for him because of their shared Jewish kinship, off the hook upon having this realization. The whole thing just ended really clumsily and wrongfootedly for me.

[bironic]

That makes a lot of sense, yes. And while "Joel" and "graceful" don't belong in the same sentence, saying his behavior was in character doesn't justify it.

[seekingferret]

It may be that if I had more context on the characters than I did, I'd have appreciated it more, but I didn't feel it dealt very fairly with Jewish tradition.

[isis]

Oh! I will have to watch these - I loved NX back in the day and have even written a little fic for it. The father-son photos you found are amazing - they totally look alike!

[selki]

Yes, it was the episode where yet another one of Maggie's boyfriends had died and she was gloomy about her curse, and Fleischman was having none of that superstitious nonsense, they had a duty! to science! So dance with me! Defy "fate"! and a great song came on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzDxp2TC7I
I remember him holding his hand out, saying, sort of indignantly, "This is a great song!"), and so she danced with him.

I loved that scene, as you can tell. :-)

Oh! Bless the Internet: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=northern-exposure&episode=s02e07
I don't like seeing you like this.
| It bothers me.
Now, don't get any ideas, | but I have more than just a professional interest | in your well-being.
I'm not afraid of you, O'Connell.
| You hear that? Everyone, I am not afraid | of Maggie O'Connell.
! No, I am not.
| I do not believe in voodoo.
! - Fleischman, sit down.
| - Come on.
Let's dance.
I don't wanna dance.
| This is a great song.
- I don't care.
- If you don't dance | with me, O'Connell you know what you're doing? You're turning your back on reason | on mankind's struggle to pull itself out of the mire | of ignorance and superstition.
You are saying „yes to | witch hunters and inquisitors you are slamming the | door on enlightenment and you are | you are inviting back the Dark Ages.
I am not doing this for you, O'Connell.
| I am doing this For civilization.

[sanguinity]

Oh, these are both lovely. I don't remember either of these pairings -- our watching of Northern Exposure was very hit and miss! -- but it's so lovely to see Marilyn and Ed again, and to see them happy, too.

[seekingferret]

For the record, Joel dances twice in Season 1: Episode 2, when Ed's Uncle Anku tricks him into doing a Native dance to divert his attention from pressing Anku to treat his cancer, and in Episode 5, when his fiancee is coming to visit and he dances happily in anticipation during the cold open.