Category: NERDING DAY

Hello, my name is Daniel O’Brien, I have six Emmys, four Writers Guild awards, some amount of Webbys and one Peabody— all for comedy writing— which grants me the great authority to present you with this, a fresh and unique comedy idea in the form of a question:

What’s the deal with airplanes?

I know! Why don’t they make the whole plane out of comedy premises?

Specifically, I’d like to talk about airplane safety videos. In case you didn’t know, airlines are required by Sky Law to keep their passengers informed on all of the latest safety precautions.

For years, every airline collectively decided to handle this task by being Boring until the early 2000s when they decided to switch things up and be Worse instead.

This is a problem that plagues all airlines, but for our immediate purposes I would like to use as many words as there are to review Virgin America’s needlessly intricate and narratively confounding Airplane Safety Video in an attempt to answer my underlying question:

Who was this for?

Here is the amount of information that needs to be conveyed in an airline safety video:

-No electronics;

-This is how seatbelts work;

-In the event of a cabin pressure change, an oxygen mask will drop down and you are supposed to put it on, first yourself and then on children;

-This is how life jackets work;

-Here are the emergency exits;

-No smoking;

-That’s it;

Time yourself getting all of that information across and see how long it takes you. I said it all in under a minute and I even included the generally unspoken first rule of flying— don’t fall in love with the pilot. The point is you can relay all of that information pretty clearly in about one breath or if pressed for time, six simple graphics on a single sheet of paper.

Virgin America took the assignment and went— and this is as nice as I can say this— in a different direction. Spoiler: It is a five-minute, dance-heavy, full-blown, musical extravaganza spanning multiple genres. An over-stimulating, educational music video that aims to satisfy the two goals of making school loud and hip hop boring an impressive two years before Hamilton perfected the art.

You can watch the music video that— to be clear— played on absolutely every single Virgin America flight for several years, or you can just read along as I describe it to you in enough detail that it will feel longer than its five minute runtime. I’ve tried to organize this article by safety lesson but, like the video itself, the information does not recognize the boundaries of logic.

SAFETY INTRO: SHUT THE FUCK UP

From the literal first second of this video, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a production production. It’s sleek, it’s stylish, we’re hearing music, we’re watching two flight attendants with expensive, matching luggage that the video would have you believe all flight attendants get for free. It’s sexy. Immediately the video screams “THIS IS NOT YOUR DADDY’S AIRLINE SAFETY VIDEO” so loudly that it can’t hear you meekly respond “I think my Daddy’s airline safety video was just a two page booklet printed on cardboard that lasted 600 years.”

Soon we meet Flight Attendant Todrick Hall, an incredibly talented performer who not only wrote and performed this opus but serves as the safety video’s primary antagonist. He loves airline safety but hates passengers, he’s a paradox of a man who maintains himself at a boiling point of horny chaos at all times. He’s here to let you know that he’s got some safety tips and he and his small army of flight attendants are going to be goddamn sexy about it.

We’re given two real rules before we can get into the fun part which, for the purposes of a safety video, are also rules.

Number one:

Pay attention, a directive that is curiously illustrated by blinding a kid with his own headphones.

And number two:

Shut up but make it horny.

If this is your first flight on Virgin and you’re following along you are now fully blind and hard as a rock: perfect conditions to learn about flight safety.

There’s a lot going on because there’s always a lot going on in this video. As Todrick the Insatiable strut dances through the plane, we meet the passengers, noting that the creators of the video took great pains to represent all the different “types” of people there are.

There’s the slacker.

The nun.

The child.

And rounding out our core cast of representative archetypes are several barely distinguishable straight-laced guys who all bought their clothes off the same mannequin.

It’s like The Village People, if they were just one cowboy and six identical guys who know a lot about crypto. The passengers are the audience surrogates, so tag yourself! (I’m tagged off screen as “Guy who realized this was one of those theatrical performances where they interact with the audience so he found a quiet corner and hung himself.”)

SEATBELT BULLYING

Todrick takes a break from sing-splaining so a flight attendant can mock us about seatbelts. Visually, we’re treated to a performance by two contortionists presented without context and one guy whose expression perfectly captures the universal experience of realizing he’s been sat next to two Uncontrollable Theater Adults…

…while the flight attendant condescendingly lectures “For the .001 percent of you who have never operated a seatbelt before… Really? I mean, it works like this…”

And I don’t even want to talk about the contortionists because, right off the bat, I appreciate a safety video that spends some of its runtime implying that anyone unfamiliar with the safety rules is a fucking idiot. This is the part of the safety video where You, a hostage who never asked for this, are being negged by a TV flight attendant who can’t believe she has to spell out the safety tips in a video that the real flight attendants have forced you to watch. You feel dumb for not knowing a thing you know. This is the kind of self-doubt and internal confusion that Todrick the Mischief craves.

That dismissive lack of concern sets the tone for the video, as the dedication to educating its passengers oscillates between begrudging perfunctory messaging about seatbelts and open contempt that they need to waste any of their airplane safety video on boring things like how not to break the law or die on an airplane.

Every federally-mandated plane lesson is an opportunity to either make you feel stupid for not knowing how planes work OR distract your brain with enough stimulation that you can’t retain new information.

ELECTRONICS AND OXYGEN RAP

For example, In the section about how the temporary use of electronics can make planes go crazy, laptops get aggressively snatched…

…and before you can even ask “Hey, do they still even make you turn off your electronics anymore?” a previously unseen little girl breaks through the wall of the plane Kool-Aid-Man-Style to rap-sync about oxygen masks.

It’s important to remember that— as a once-hip and comparatively affordable option— Virgin America was likely responsible for a lot of people’s first flight, meaning their first ever exposure to the idea of oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling mid-flight was fast-rapped at them by a child doing full-body rolls.

You might be thinking “With stylish outfits, mature dance moves and an adult voice, are the makers of this safety video trying to sexualize this child?” I want to make it absolutely clear that you are the one thinking that, I don’t think that, this is a thought that you have, but if you have that thought and are reasonably disgusted by it, you have to remember, this video was made in 2013 which in Sky Years was 1940. Anything goes, basically.

Here’s a small but important note about this section. I’ve flown enough times and on planes that don’t take the instructional portion as an opportunity to shame and distract me to be pretty familiar with the oxygen mask spiel, enough that I know by heart that one of the most important things to remember is that when you’re traveling with someone young or otherwise helpless, you have to put the mask on yourself before putting it on them. It’s a necessary safety tip, but a grim thought for a parent; disregard all of your instincts to save your child first and instead look out for yourself. Chilling but important. Here’s my pro tip to the producers:

Don’t have an adorable child explain this part.

Let one of the hot-but-mean flight attendants teach me that children’s lives matter less because of their size or whatever. Or better yet, bring back the never-discussed nun to somberly explain that looking out for number one is all part of God’s plan. Something.

We’ve just been introduced to a rapping child who wants to teach us about oxygen flow while wearing bracelets, a fun hat, a bow— in other words, someone exhibiting nuclear levels of precociousness. If I have to confront the dark possibility of calmly putting on an oxygen mask while my tiny niece or nephew freaks out next to me and wonders why— for the first time in their short life— their adult is not helping them, I’d prefer not to get that instruction from a cute lil’ angelbaby who’s too young to understand why no pilot wants a plane full of unconscious adults and fully-masked-but-insane toddlers.

LIFE VEST 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES

In terms of safety lessons, the next item on the agenda is life jacket awareness but, in terms of spectacle, it’s time for the robot rap. That’s right, it’s time to learn how to survive a water landing from robots who never open their mouths because they don’t need to breathe. Five men in suits gesticulate robotically and I’m not too proud to admit that the robot rap scares me.

Maybe it’s the Matrix, Agent Smith-style suit and sunglasses combination, maybe it’s the jerky and inhuman but synchronized movements, maybe it’s the unsettling dissonance that occurs when a voice can be heard but the robots are pointedly not lip-synching, maybe it’s the fact that everyone in this video is having fun except this unsmiling quintet of water safety terminators, but it’s all DEEPLY uncomfortable. They were asked “window or aisle” and without moving their mouths they all incepted in one monotone voice into your brain “uncanny valley.” Their perfect-yet upsetting movements are serving “The animatronics on the Men in Black ride have come to life and can’t be drowned.”

I hate them.

And as far as effectively teaching us about life vests, this section leaves a lot to be desired. I swear I’m not trying to be a buzzkill— no one likes the kid in class who raises their hand in the middle of a movie to ask how it pertains to the lessons.

I know I know, I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum and I recognize that this video is SUPPOSED to be about soulless robots demonstrating how they’ll effortlessly survive even when we shoot down their attack plane, but excuse me teacher I still have questions about the life vests. My main question is “Where actually is my life vest?”

That’s a question I have in real life because I never found out where specifically under my seat the life vest is, and how I’m supposed to access it while sitting in my chair, breathing through a bag from the ceiling and strapped to my seat while the plane crashes.

If you’ve also ever wondered about this, your question will not be answered by this video as the plane the robots have taken over has an altogether different set up.

The robots say “under your seat there’s a life vest” and, sure, that’s true enough for them.

Don’t get me wrong, if I was on a five-person plane that was actually a soundstage in Burbank or some shit and my life vest was laid out neatly directly at my feet, I can see how this video would be helpful. But on every plane I’ve ever been on, the under-the-seat space is occupied by bags belonging to me and the other passengers and I doubt anyone in an emergency would find it helpful to reach beneath their seat and find my backpack full of “ideas notebooks,” a Switch I forgot to charge, anti-diarrhea medicine and the extra underwear that didn’t fit in my other bag.

“What, so you’re saying in this FUN MUSIC VIDEO they should RECREATE THE CONDITIONS of an AIRPLANE FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES?”

Yeah, kinda!

It just feels once again crucial to point out that this is supposed to be a video teaching you what to do in the event of a plane disaster which makes it a little confusing that instead of showing you an actual plane, they’re demonstrating this part in a minimalist reimagining of what planes might look like in a future where all the humans are dead.

If I start choking in a restaurant, I hope whatever pamphlets they have on hand are about the Heimlich Maneuver and not a stylized statement piece of what it would look like if a snake did the Heimlich on a Dracula.

THE EMERGENCY EXIT— OR SOMETHING MORE SINISTER— IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU

While we process how the robot rap made all of us more scared and less prepared, the video returns to its pop roots as some flight attendants sing about evacuating the plane via inflatable emergency slides. There are four exits on the plane, and the slides will only deploy when— I’m so sorry I cannot concentrate because Todrick the Merciless has returned to tell me with just one look but in no uncertain terms, “I am gonna fuck your chick.”

Sorry, there’s simply no other way to read this situation. I know when I’m projecting my own stuff on art. I know that my interpretation of Little Shop of Horrors as “an allegory about the dangers of coveting your dentist’s wife and raising an unbaptized plant” says more about me and my Catholic upbringing than it does about the movie’s intentions.

But the Virgin America Flight Safety video— a similarly doo-wop-infused musical extravaganza— leaves no such room for misinterpretation. Todrick? This man right here, this man with both Fuck Me Eyes and Fuck YOU Eyes? This man Todrick the Penetrator?

This man wants you to know that your partner like all partners are simply on loan until His Wants grow too unsustainable.

This man Todrick the Waggle wants to move into my home, sleep in my bed with my wife and introduce himself as “your mom’s special friend” to our dog and all of our plants (which for the record were faithfully baptized to completion).

If I was just minding my own business and then I saw this man dancing with my wife while giving me this look right in the eyes?

I’d be terrified, and not just because I missed entirely the locations and number of the exits.

Oh, speaking of being terrified in the section of the airplane video about emergency slides to avoid a water death, this also happens.

AAAAHHH!!!

AAAHHH!!

Some part of my brain understands that this is an impressive display of dance skill, but the part of my brain that drinks water and went to school and avoided the cool drugs goes AHHHH! THEY ARE PEOPLE BUT MOVING TOO QUICKLY AND LIKE SOMETHING THAT IS NOT PEOPLE AND NOT QUITE SPIDERS BUT CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE TERRIFYING! ON THIS PLANE! FIGHT AND FLIGHT. FIGHT AND FLIGHT!

My guess is the production team hired some dancers who could specifically do “Jerky Japanese Ghost Finger Crawl” and decided they’d better film it as long as they’re paying for it, but in terms of safety messaging, the only point that’s been effectively communicated is “If the plane goes down, you will have bigger problems as the Emergency Lights automatically activate the two Violent Crab Demons stationed on every Virgin America flight.”

DON’T SMOKE EVEN THOUGH DOING SO WOULD REALLY RELIEVE THE TENSION RIGHT NOW

Having exhausted all of the known musical genres (pop, little kid rapping with an adult voice, robots) we return to little kid rapping with an adult voice.

This hitherto concealed Cool Kid speak-rap-lip-syncs the words of an adult man with a deep voice like Tone Loc in Bebe’s Kids, a reference we all get.

The kid is the coolest person in the music video by a mile, most likely because he is voiced by someone who has smoked ten thousand cigarettes.

There’s not a ton going on in this section, which is an odd thing to say in a section where it would also be true to say “The sexy librarian contortionist from before returns to vape until a smooth-talking child informs her that doing so is a federal crime.”

In any other context, this scene would short-circuit your brain, but because the video has primed us for madness we simply let it wash over us and say “Yes, of course. This now.”

At this point, we’re so desensitized to the deliberately inscrutable anti-narrative of this piece that it honestly wouldn’t be out of place if Chester the Cheetah popped up to say “Don’t forget, kids: mail fraud is a crime. Bazinga!”

All is fair in a mash-up of genres and sky nonsense and the plane is going to take off whether we’re ready or not.

WRAP UP, MORONS, IT’S ALREADY OVER

To wrap up the safety video, Todrick the Future and a Random Flight Attendant return to remind you to make your seat upright and put your tray tables away, and they speak this instead of singing it because as far as I can tell these are literally the only two things flight crews actually care about.

We are informed that there’s a safety card in the pocket of the seats in front of us and that we should read and review it before takeoff, which, yeah, no shit. Five minutes later I know less about seatbelts than when this started but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be caught asking a question.

Finally everyone— the robots, the nun we forgot about, both kids, the contortionists, some flag twirlers, the dirtbag slacker, and even a few bonus freaks we haven’t seen before— comes out for a joyful and athletic dance party. Everyone gets their turn in the spotlight to show off a move or two and it honestly rules.

Look. The dancing is impressive and the song is catchy. It’s okay if that video pumped you up. It pumped me up. It made me want to dance, to sing, to create, to have sex with one nun, to vape— it even distracted me from the fact that I still can’t intellectually figure out where my personal, floating safety device is.

As a musical experience, it’s fun. Multiple So You Think You Can Dance alumnae, a few contortionists and some talented children spent 26 hours making a safety video that was more entertaining than it had any business being, and if your takeaway was “I sure would love to support whomever directed this,” Galinda Voice GOOD NEWS, you can because it was directed by Jon Chu the literal director of Wicked. So, statistically speaking based on box office, you probably already did support Virgin America Airline Safety video/Now You See Me 2/GI Joe: Retaliation director Jon Chu.

As a five-minute safety video designed to convey less than one minute of necessary information it is, I’m sorry to say, dogshit. This video has millions of view, most of which are me and I still don’t know if the fucking oxygen mask stays hooked up to the ceiling and which passenger I’m supposed to eat first in the event of a crash or turbulence.

And that’s not just because I’m an idiot! It’s worth noting that an argument can be made that quirky airline safety videos are actually making passengers less safe, and the Virgin America video is largely credited as patient zero for kicking off the trend of whacky, viral safety videos, even though that— as either a business or artistic concept— doesn’t make any sense.

Attempting to go viral– as a writer or performer or me, a Vaguely Internet Someone— is good and smart and brave. An online creator going viral, why that’s just about the noblest pursuit a person can have. Businesses and especially Airplanes shouldn’t do that; they should focus their energy on building more leg room and soundproofing their toilets. What good could virality possibly do for an airline?

Case in point, this is a five-minute long viral video complete with a full-ass companion piece making of documentary for, it needs to be stressed, an airline that doesn’t exist anymore as Virgin America ceased operations in 2018.

I didn’t even get to the wildest behind-the-scenes details, like:

-Some of the performers in the video are actual Virgin America flight attendants, an opposite-of-fun fact that a) doesn’t make the video better b) doesn’t make me feel particularly safer and c) sucks.

-Todrick Hall, who starred in and wrote the video, was reportedly only paid $3000 for it.

-The woman who provided the voice for Oxygen Girl Rapper ended up suing the airline for using her work without her permission which seems, I’m just going to say it, impossible.

-Just think about it.

-I mean like actually think about it. You’re in a recording booth doing take three of a rap about oxygen masks falling from the sky in the event of a plane crash from the perspective of a child; at no point did you ask “Hey what are you going to use this for?”

-The video came with its own hashtag but, like, why? Literally why?

Okay. Readers at home can’t know this, but it is nighttime now, so it seems like a good time to conclude this column by revisiting my initial question: Who was this for? And given that no lives were provably saved, at least one of the performers sued the production and it potentially made passengers less safe all in an attempt to help a now-dead airline GO VIRAL on a now-mostly-dead social media website— and given that I’ve now written whoops over 4,000 words about a horny airplane video that still never explained why it had a nun in the first place, I think we have our answer. Who was this for?

Me.

Daniel O’Brien is a writer for Last Week Tonight who unfortunately also has a podcast with fellow Cracked alum Soren Bowie. He lives in New Jersey with his smoke show wife and their pointless dog.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mike Stiles, who is really into inflatable airplane life vest play.