Gorbachov: The Music Video

Tom Stern was commissioned to make a video for a Russian heavy metal band called ANJ. It's funny-strange and worth watching. From Stern's description:

When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that's how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it's half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

Gorbachov: The Music Video (Vimeo, thanks Vann Hall!)

[#1 posted by Renwaldonews , July 11, 2008 1:19 PM]

w00t 1st post, and the video rocks!

[#2 posted by the_boy , July 11, 2008 1:31 PM]

Well that was awesome.

[#3 posted by Joe , July 11, 2008 1:41 PM]

No, Russians don't spell it Gorbachov. They spell it Горбачев (using the Cyrillic alphabet).

[#4 posted by ulor , July 11, 2008 2:30 PM]

That is fscking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsck) awesome.

[#5 posted by ill lich , July 11, 2008 2:31 PM]

It's PRONOUNCED GorbachOv, but spelled with an E and a diacritic mark (what we usually call an umlaut) above it, which changes the pronunciation.

Or maybe he was referring to the spelling of Mikael, which I'm not sure of either, but then, like Chinese, there are a lot of ways one could re-spell proper names in the Latin alphabet

[#6 posted by doug117 , July 11, 2008 4:17 PM]

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаил Сергеевич Горбачёв

Only one spelling in Russian.

[#7 posted by the_boy , July 11, 2008 5:58 PM]

oh, boingboing commenters. they give us metal, and we give them grammar complaints

[#8 posted by seanisblogging , July 11, 2008 6:38 PM]

I'm not sure, but I think that may have been the greatest thing I have ever seen.

[#9 posted by haaz , July 11, 2008 9:14 PM]

Arguably one of the greatest videos I've ever seen. Not just because Kerri Sherman is in it, nor because of Gorbie's twitch pectorals.... (;kljsd;fljks) but the whole thing is wonderful for this child of the 1980s Cold War!

[#10 posted by tomjstern , July 12, 2008 12:29 PM]

Hey thanks for the kind words everyone. I don't even mind the niggly squabbling over the spelling of the name... I wrote it that way because that's how it was spelled on the cd of the song that the band gave me. So that is how those particular Russians spell it. They are wrong I guess, but there you go. I for one am more interested in Kerri Sherman's mind altering physiognomy. And the super cool old Soviet art that I pilfered and animated. Much of the background art was done by the Stenberg Brothers, whose work was featured at MOMA a few years back. They did propaganda, but movie and theater posters as well. The posters are featured in a book that MOMA put out. Anyway, I slaved (pun intended) on this video for months and it;s great to hear that people like it. It was shot very low budget in front of a small green screen. After Effects and a lot of hard work did the rest.

[#11 posted by Elvis Pelt , July 12, 2008 10:38 PM]

Great video! Laser eyeballs and everything!

[#12 posted by Kieran O'Neill , July 14, 2008 5:32 AM]

Wow. And they're after saving them from the zombies he makes it rain twinkies and Levis...

As for the pronunciation: I seem to recall something about "-ёв" as a word ending being pronounced "ov" in some parts of Russia and "ev" in others (being one of very few pronunciation in the language, since Cyrillic is generally strictly phonetic).

And, well, there are several systems for Cyrillic -> Latin transliteration, anyway.