There’s something about Filipino culture that makes every Filipino, deep down, want to be a game show host or entertainer. Think about that for a moment and suddenly my schtick — accordion-playing mixed with blogging and technical evangelism suddenly makes sense.
Take this cultural tendency and mix it with the general preference in the Philippines for R&B, funk and soul music and our fondness for line dancing. With that in mind, getting 1500 inmates at a Filipino prison (the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, Philippines) to do the dance routine from the Thriller video doesn’t seem unexpected:
I’ll bet you could never coordinate this in a North American prison.
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Well, next time I’m doing villainy in the Philippines, I’ll know where to be thrown in jail!
And…do you think, when they were casting part, they could’ve gotten one guy who wasn’t completely balding to play the girl?
I think its a testament to their sense of accuracy that they had the dude dressed up as a girl in the first place.
Also: that is the weirdest thing I’ve seen today..
As i recall from the Blues Brothers audio commentary, they did shoot the final Jailhouse Rock scene in a prison
Joe Walsh apparently plays one of the cons, but the rest were real convicts — and real guards.
I’d have to re-listen to the audio commentary to verify.
Plus Oliver Stone shot the lengthy prison sequence in a prison too, with the cons being extras. Some of the cast reported being quite nervous about this, especially when the riot scenes were shot, but they pulled it off.
Ah, if only Dr. Evil dared to do the same. That would have been possible, and fun!
That was freaking awesome!
Props to the guy playing the girl – that was an Acadamy Award worthy performance.
Also question – does the Philipino language use the same alphabet as English?
I was concerned about the inmate playing the woman. I’m pretty sure that inmates in a male prison would generally *not* want this role. I’m afraid that he may already have been forced into it long before, e.g. at knifepoint, and so was already “typecast”.
@James: The Philippines has two official languages: English and Filipino (a variant of the Tagalog language; in casual conversation between non-linguistic scholars, “Tagalog” and “Filipino” are used interchangeably). As a result, a lot of the signage you’ll see in the Philippines is in English.
When I was in school in the Philippines (1972 – 1974), I learned the Filipino alphabet as:
A B K D E G H I L M N Ng O P R S T U W Y
According to Wikipedia, the alphabet was expanded in 1976 to accommodate Spanish and English loanwords and then contracted to the current 28 in 1987 to:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N Ñ Ng O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.
Here’s another video that is, if not better, at least a lot geekier:
Algorithm March
The Algorithm March is from a Japanese kids’ show about match called Pythagoras Switch. Do a youtube search on that and you’ll also finds lots and lots of Rube Golberg devices, used as bumpers on the show.
Here’s the link to the prisoners’ Algorith March.
Hmmm…recreation or punishment?
I was going to simply write that I watched a video of a wedding party doing the Thriller dance recently and to say those Okies got owned by these Filipino convicts. But when I searched for wedding party thriller I discovered there’s not just one such video but many. There are a couple of dupes but I had no idea doing the Thriller dance at weddings was such a thing.