Friday Night Videos: The Evolution of Major Tom

1969

I missed the anniversary, but 40 years ago last month Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon, touched down. At the time, I was throwing up in a bayou in Louisiana, but that's another story for another post.

In the same year, David Bowie, obviously influenced by the Apollo missions and Kubrick's 2001, recorded his first version of Space Oddity, the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who gets lost in space somewhere around the moon. There's not much to the storyline, really, but back in '69 Bowie produced a nerdy little low-budget film to go with his novelty song (as a medium, rock video hadn't yet come into it's own). To me, there's something charming about this rare and naive little clip, and if you watch no other video in this post, do watch this one, if for no other reason than its cheesy YouTube production values and to see how far music has come in the past 40 years. This clip is probably the reason for this entire post.

1972

After Bowie became a star and adopted his Ziggy Stardust character, he re-recorded Space Oddity and jettisoned the older version and his little low-fi movie like Major Tom jettisons used booster engines. Since his revamped little novelty song had became his first big hit (second in the U.S., after Changes), he had a whole new video of it shot in his Ziggy Stardust persona. This is the version with which most people are now probably most familiar.

1980

Eight years and at least three Bowie personae/incarnations later (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke), MTV was finally providing an outlet for music videos on basic cable. Note the slick, if dated, MTV production values here. Bowie, dressed this time as Pierrot for some reason, revisits and updates the Space Oddity story to report that Major Tom's now a junkie.

1983

And three years after that, it was finally up to German Peter Schilling to reimagine the Major Tom story, setting it to a danceable synthpop beat for the Nouvelle Vague set. By this time, the sketchy little story had taken on nearly mythic proportions, and Schilling fills in some plot details and manages to simultaneously be both iconoclastic and reverent as he recounts Major Tom's plight and envisions a paradise that features roller-skating carhops with bad 80s haircuts.

One idea, 14 years of music and video. Talk about post-modernism . . .