Len Lye Anticipates the Music Video and Mel Brooks Anticipates Beavis and Butt-Head.

 A Tennis Court A Mile Long. 
(Apologies this isn't the whole thing. It keeps getting taken down.)

 With certain incredibly obvious exceptions, I love the promise of the nineteen-thirties. That first decade of talking pictures feels ever so slightly like the internet in the noughties pre-twitter, a mixing bowl of idea-sharing, slang-altering, new-sounding voices before factional coalescing weaponised the medium. And even after that, like the internet more recently, the propaganda could be fun too. I walked in on some Len Lye shorts at the Tate Britain recently, completely forgotting that these fore-runners of the music video would turn out to be adverts for the General Post Office. Without that extraordinarily incongruous voice-over at the end, I'd be surprised if most people coming new to them could guess when these films had been made.

 I've no idea how contemporary film audiences behaved to Rupert Doone busting these moves back in 1936, but we have Mel Brooks to thank for giving us a glimpse of how audiences reacted thirty years later (there are some excellent lines in this):

"See? Even if they don't wanna, they get dirty."