The Smashing Pumpkins "Tonight Tonight"

To think its enchanting music video almost never came to be. Directed by the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (who went on to helm Little Miss Sunshine), the original concept was a Busby Berkeley-esque musical, characterized by blankly smiling women in bathing caps performing elaborate swimming patterns and acrobatics. But when the Red Hot Chili Peppers released a nearly identical video for “Aeroplane”, Dayton and Faris had to revisit the drawing board. After abandoning a third concept involving audience P.O.V., they decided to pay homage to another classic filmmaker, French visionary Georges Melies, and his milestone silent sci-fi film, 1902’s A Trip To The Moon.

Although watching the revolutionary film nowadays is a cinematic treat, one can’t help but wish the details were more vivid. Filmmaking was still in its primitive stages, and its surreal nature is often bogged down by the cloudy cinematography. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a masterpiece, but the video for “Tonight, Tonight” brought it to a more fully realized form, bringing all the black and white dreariness into technicolor tints mixed with sepia. Most of the actors remain aesthetically drab while the environment around them glows with fluorescent beauty and a colored cardboard, children’s theatre aesthetic, making for a piece of art that looks fittingly archaic but wonderfully hallucinatory at the same time. It manages to capture the album artwork of Mellon Collie, something that was an inspiration for the directors as it “looked like a silent movie.”

The video follows the same basic skeleton of a storyline. However there are slight artistic changes: the astronomers are replaced with two young lovers (played by SpongeBob Squarepants voice actors Tom Kenny and Jill Talley), the rocketship is substituted with a steampunk blimp, and the humanoid stars are traded in for the Pumpkins themselves, decked out in Victorian evening wear and classical instruments. But the point of the video isn’t accuracy. It isn’t a remake. It simply uses the images and concept of the original film as a springboard for the Pumpkins’ more romantic form of storytelling. During each of the song’s sunbursting string crescendoes, we see the young couple persevere in some shape or form, the most emotional one being when they break free of the ropes that the aliens have used to ensnare them. The fight that ensues isn’t a triumph of scientific achievement as in the original film, but a triumph of our heroes’ relationship.

As in the original film, they escape to the ocean, only here, they meet a merman who wards off a predatory fish. The merman enlists the help of his mermaid friends and a large octopus to put on an underwater show for the young couple before sending them to the surface in a gigantic bubble. What began as one of the world’s finest science fiction films ends as one of the world’s best date movies.

Here goes the original Georges Melies - A trip to the moon (1902) remember Humans this movie was made in 1902 the slient era for film, so there is no dialect.