The Big Squeeze Day Eighty-Eight "Harvey the Wonder Hamster" from Alapalooza
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with three primary objectives in mind. First and foremost, I want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero.
Even more importantly, I want to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and over 80 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name. Third, I want to promote the Weird A-Coloring to Al “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I am doing with Felipe as well as its hardcover, full-color signed and numbered limited edition version, which you can pre-order here
Author’s Commentary: Writing The Weird Accordion to Al as an online column was an endless, endlessly delayed endeavor that for much of its duration felt like it would never actually end. I initially set out to finish the project in a little over a year. The idea was that I’d crank out a new Weird Accordion to Al entry every day of the week. That quickly proved impossible, in part because it was just too much damned work to handle and partially because for pretty much its entire duration, The Weird Accordion to Al was far and away the least read, least popular part of my website.
Crazy, huh? What was previously a money-losing endeavor turned out to be a cash cow for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place AND Declan-Haven Books.
I remember when I told Al that I would be doing a column where I wrote about every song on every one of his albums for my new website he asked me if it would be a book at the end. I replied that it would and he very graciously volunteered to fact-check it. I couldn’t let Al down by not finishing the project/book. That motivation helped get me through the many bumps in the road and the many long months when I abandoned the column temporarily to focus on more popular and lucrative projects.
In this entry I float the idea of writing about The Weird Al Show for the Weird Accordion to Al book but at that point the idea of a Weird Accordion to Al book felt almost impossibly far away.
Of course I did end up finishing the book AND the extended version AND now a coloring book spin-off.
Great things can happen when you push through all of the inertia and self-doubt that holds you back.
Original article:
Just how impossibly rich and deep is the life and career of American pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic? It’s so impossibly rich and deep and vast that at this point we have devoted ninety entries running some one hundred thousand words (or enough to fill the average book and a half) to Al’s life and career and there is so much we either haven’t gotten to at all or covered only in passing.
Al is one of the true masters of the music video form. It’s hard to overstate the importance of music videos in Al’s career yet we’ve dealt with them only tangentially. We similarly haven’t discussed Al’s many movie cameos from this period, or his even more prolific work as an in-demand voice actor. Heck, we didn’t cover his quasi-autobiographical mockumentary The Compleat Al even a little bit, nor have I written at all about the similarly fictionalized faux-memoir The Authorized Al.
That’s only the beginning of the stuff I somehow haven’t gotten around to writing about. I didn’t write about UHF the movie even when I was writing about the soundtrack and some of the more observant of y’all may have noticed that Al's Grammy-nominated album-length collaboration with legendary electronic musician Wendy Carlos (who some of y’all probably know as the woman who composed the score for a little movie called The Shining) on the classical chestnut Peter and the Wolf has been ignored by this column in its entirety.
What can I say? When you only have one hundred thousand words to devote to the first half of someone’s career you’re going to have to overlook an awful lot. There’s just so much of Al out there in myriad forms that even a perversely exhaustive exploration of the man’s music like this has to be selective in its coverage.
For example, a month or two before I got the direct message on Twitter from Al asking me to write his extremely still available for purchase coffee table book Weird Al: The Book, I satiated an intense nostalgic curiosity about some of the odder corners of Al’s early career by looking up some of his “AL-TV” segments from MTV and later VH-1.
The highlights of “AL-TV” were fake interviews between Al and huge pop stars where real answers were juxtaposed with Al’s “questions” to comic effect through the magic of constructive editing. The specials, which began in 1984 and would continue, intermittently, over the next two decades, afforded Al a new outlet and medium to lampoon the pretension and posturing of the rock and pop world.
AL-TV was cheap, entertaining, good programming for MTV and unbeatable promotion for Al. It also introduced some beloved running gags and inside jokes, most notably in the form of Al’s beloved pet, Harvey the Wonder Hamster. Harvey looked for all the world like a normal hamster but Al nevertheless considered him worthy of being heralded in song.
Harvey figured prominently in AL-TV, including a clip where Al not only talks up his furry little buddy, but sings the official “Harvey the Wonder Hamster” theme song before cavalierly chucking his little pal off the roof of a building. It’s a jarring gag, both because Al is pretending to casually commit murder and because Al is so famously an animal lover and vegan. Then again, as we have discovered here, in his music and comedy, Al will do all manner of things he won’t do in his famously wholesome real life.
The “Harvey the Wonder Hamster” theme song, a cheery, upbeat, insanely infectious little children’s ditty, makes its debut on a long-playing record album on Alapalooza, as a twenty-one second oddity on the second half of the album, wedged between two of Al’s lesser originals from this era. Its placement adds to the random nature of the album’s second half.
Yes, both Harvey the Wonder Hamster had been around a while when Al decided to pay tribute to iconic animal on record and he’d go on to play an even bigger role in another beloved Al cult oddity too good and smart and weird to be successful: The Weird Al Show. Will I get around to covering The Weird Al Show for the Weird Accordion to Al? I don’t know. We’ve only got about one hundred thousand words left of space left. Thankfully, we’ve got the eventual Weird Accordion to Al book to fill in the many, many holes somehow left even in a project this insanely, pathologically obsessive.
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are NINE so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al and a signed copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al directly from me here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or from Amazon here
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