“Weird Al” Yankovic’s Emmy- winning biopic spoof, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, took more liberties with the facts that even typical tall-tale rock ‘n roll biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman, and some humorless viewers still quite haven’t figured out that Weird bears precious little resemblance to Yankovic’s rather PG-rated real life.
"That's the problem when you're trying to be ironic: There's always going to be a few people that just take it at face value. I mean, I get assassinated at the end of the movie!" Yankovic spoiler-alertingly tells Music Times, laughing. "And yet, I guarantee you there are some people out there going, 'Oh, yes, the whole thing is absolutely true! It has to be true! Why wouldn't it be true?' It seems like people buy into it more than they should, but there's always a different point at which they realize it's not 100 percent accurate. I mean, when the first trailer came out, one of the biggest Google searches was, 'Did Weird Al and Madonna have an affair?' And I guarantee you there are still people out there that think we did."
However, there's one stranger-than-fiction, totally-true Yankovic story that made it into Weird, and it could soon become an answer/question on Amazon Prime Video's just-announced Jeopardy! spinoff, Pop Culture Jeopardy!:
"This Greg Kihn Band spoof inspired a reboot of the original Jeopardy! game show in 1984."
"What is 'I Lost on Jeopardy,' by 'Weird Al' Yankovic?"
That is correct!
So, here's what happened: A new daily syndicated version of Jeopardy!, which had been off the air since 1979, premiered in September 1984, just three months after the success of Yankovic’s "I Lost on Jeopardy," which will celebrate its 40th anniversary on June 4. Jeopardy! remains on the air to this day, still averaging 25 million viewers a week, and that’s largely down to the phenomenon that's known in Weird as the “Yankovic Bump.”
“According to [Jeopardy! creator] Merv Griffin, I was on his TV [talk] show and he gave me credit for helping to bring Jeopardy! back on the air,” Yankovic reveals. “Because when I did ‘I Lost on Jeopardy,’ it was a nostalgia piece — it was referencing the old show from the ‘60s that I grew up with, with Art Fleming as the host and Don Pardo as the announcer. It was not on the air at that time. Maybe Merv was just being nice, but he said because of the public reaction to ‘I Lost on Jeopardy,’ that helped bring Jeopardy! back.”
(See Griffin credit and warmly thank Yankovic at the 4:50 mark in the vintage clip below.)
Amusingly, in another surreal art-imitating-life moment, Al later appeared on another Jeopardy! spinoff, VH1's Rock & Roll Jeopardy!, playing against KC from the Sunshine Band and Howard Stern Show star Gary “Baba Booey” Dell'abate… and, yes, he lost. “I was killing it in the practice, but when the show actually started, my buzzer was just not doing it. So, I actually did lose on Jeopardy! — and everybody was very happy about that,” Yankovic chuckles.
One half- or perhaps three-quarter-truth that did make it into Weird was the fact that the young Al really did acquire his first beloved accordion through a door-to-door salesman. Yankovic of course clarifies that “my father didn't beat the ever-loving crap out of the accordion salesman; we had that twisted in the film, because obviously in a musical biopic, you can't have loving, supportive parents that want to see you flourish in music!” But the rest of that scene did indeed take place at the Yankovic family home, straight out of Lynwood.
“This would've been 1966, I think, and the whole concept of door-to-door salesmen feels so alien now. You would never let a stranger into your home now! But that was a thing in the ‘60s,” Al recalls. “In fact, Judy Tenuta had a very similar experience — she learned accordion because of a door-to-door salesman. I don't remember if this salesman literally brought an accordion to our door, but he was trying to hawk music lessons. His conservatory offered both accordion lessons and guitar lessons, and my parents wisely decided accordion — because it was the ‘60s, after all, and what's more cutting-edge than an accordion? It might've been a little bit to do with the fact that I shared a last name with Frankie Yankovic, the polka king, so they thought, ‘Oh, there should be at least two accordion-playing Yankovics in the world.’ And I suppose they figured when you play the accordion, you're a one-man band and the life of every party. I guess they wanted me to be extremely popular in high school. What better way than to give your child accordion lessons?”
In Weird, the teenage Al does become Lynwood High’s BMOC thanks to his accordion-playing prowess, but in real life, he admits, “In my early teens, I was thinking, ‘Man, I wish I had a guitar, because nobody wants to be in a rock band with me for some crazy reason!’ But it ultimately wound up being great for me, because it made me stand out. It made me learn that I had to kind of go my own way, to quote Fleetwood Mac, and figure out something else I could do. I was a big fan of The Dr. Demento Show and I loved comedy music, and the accordion apparently lent itself well to that. In fact, Dr. Demento told me that when he got my first tape in the mail — and it was a very amateurish, poorly recorded tape of teenage me — if I had been playing a guitar, he would've thrown the tape right in the trash. But because I played the accordion, he thought, ‘Oh, this kid is playing the accordion and thinking he's cool! That's a pretty novel concept, so I want to give this guy a little exposure.’”
As for Weird’s many hilarious non-truths, Al says he’s surprisingly not heard from Madonna or her camp about her reaction to their fake onscreen affair, but he was worried about a couple of Weird’s other superstar plot twists — namely the one about Michael Jackson plagiarizing Al’s “Eat It” to create the Thriller smash “Beat It.” Yankovic had already received “a lot of flak” from “really upset” Jackson fans when — after HBO’s bombshell documentary Leaving Neverland came out — he decided to retire his MJ parodies from his concert setlists. But both Jackson’s fans and the Jackson family themselves “were somehow fine with me ragging on Michael and claiming that I wrote ‘Eat It’ before ‘Beat It.’ I think it was such an obvious joke that nobody really got upset about that.”
However, Yankovic confesses, “I was really concerned, because we'd gotten preliminary permission to use ‘Eat It’ in the movie, but after we had a final cut, I was told they had to play the movie for both the Michael Jackson camp and the Queen camp [whose “Another One Bites the Dust” had been spoofed by Al as “Another One Rides the Bus”]. We had to make sure they were OK with it. And I was like, what? Because I thought everything had been nailed down. But they had apparently final say, so if they didn't like something in the movie, they’d have us take it out. I had my fingers crossed very tightly that they weren't going to be offended by it. Thankfully, both camps had really good senses of humor about it.”
Al says Jackson’s people “made us take out one thing,” although he won't specify what it was. But he does reveal, “With Queen, I will tell you, the only thing they said before we shot was there could be no mention at all of Freddie Mercury in the movie. Because in the original script, in the pool-party scene, instead of me doing battle with Wolfman Jack and John Deacon, it was me having a sing-off with Freddie Mercury. We had found a guy that sounds just like Freddie Mercury who would've dubbed in the singing parts, and we were ready to shoot it, but then we had to do a very last-minute kind of major rewrite for that scene, because Queen said, ‘No — no Freddie in the movie. You can't even reference him.’ … And for whatever reason, we also weren't legally allowed to show a Queen album cover, which seems kind of crazy, but that was another thing. So, knowing all that, I was thinking, ‘Oh, they are going to tear this movie apart! They're just going to hate this!’ They let us get away with everything else, but there was about a week where I was on the floor in a fetal position going, ‘They're going to kill this movie.’”
Unlike Michael Jackson — or another artist Al once parodied, R. Kelly (Yankovic says his Kelly send-up, “Trapped in the Drive-Thru,” is one he’ll probably never play live again) — Yankovic has not led a particularly controversial or R-rated life. That’s why he never considered making a traditional biopic. However, he did record an original in the ‘80s that many radio stations surprisingly refused to play. Al’s label, Scotti Brothers Records, didn’t even want to put it out at the time, although you might hear it in light rotation this month: the forgotten holiday classic, “Christmas at Ground Zero.”
“I think part of that was me rebelling against my record label, because ever since my first album, they were on my back about recording a Christmas album. That's sort of the thing you do with any kind of novelty hit — like, the next thing you do is a Christmas song. It's basically a quick cash-grab, evergreen. But I just didn't want to do a parody of ‘Jingle Bells’ or whatever they had in mind,” Al explains, “So, I thought, ‘Oh, if you want a Christmas song, I'll give you a Christmas song — but you're not gonna like it!’ And I gave them ‘Christmas at Ground Zero.’ They didn't even want to spend money on the music video, so I paid for one out of my own pocket, very low-budget, mostly just cutting together public domain clips. And then it got banned by a lot of radio stations, who didn't really think it was appropriate to have a song about nuclear annihilation during the holidays, for some reason! The label actually did put it out, I guess under duress; they didn't love it, but they thought, ‘Let's give it a shot,’ because they'd been wrong before. But no, it didn't really work. It didn't burn up the airwaves or anything like that. It wasn't what they were looking for.”
Yankovic has played “Christmas at Ground Zero” on his recent originals-heavy Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tours, although now he prefaces the song by stressing that it was written years before 9/11, the tragedy with which the term “Ground Zero” is now mainly associated. That being said, he does say that his Vanity treks made him realize that despite his squeaky-clean image, much of his own music is quite dark — check out some of the gross-out lines in "One More Minute,” for example — and even potentially controversial.
“I'm a pretty happy guy, but yeah, I guess I've got these dark thoughts. Or maybe it's just funnier from coming from a happy guy like me, to hear all these dark songs,” Yankovic muses. “There's no profanity, it's not sexual in nature, but there's a lot of violence! It may fall under the general umbrella of ‘family-friendly,’ but there are certainly songs that you probably wouldn't want to play for young kids, because there's some seriously twisted stuff going on there.”
So... what's Al's most R-rated song, the least child-friendly composition in his catalog? That could make for a great Pop Culture Jeopardy! answer/question as well.
“Oh, gosh, that depends on how you raise your kids, I guess,” Yankovic laughs. “I saw online at one point, somebody had made a chart where they showed my songs and listed them in order by the body count — by how many people died! And I think that the No. 1 song was ‘One of Those Days,’ because at the end, the world blows up and everybody's dead. That would be like 7 billion people, so that was at the top of the list.”
There is no premiere date set yet for Pop Culture Jeopardy!, but the pop-culture-reference-packed Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is available on Blu-ray now.
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