"Imagine" it's five years later
We are all still living in the afterglow of 'Wonder Woman 1984' (and COVID)
LOS ANGELES, CA - Most of the time, a five year anniversary1 is something to celebrate. But sometimes you’re marking a tragedy, and in this case we’re not talking about COVID. We’re talking about a video inspired by COVID.
That’s right! The “Imagine” video turns five years old2 today, both a 2020 time capsule and prescient warning of untold Hollywood tone-deafness to come, all because celebrities had already started going insane six days into lockdown.
You can find the original video on your own — I’m not going to ‘Ring’ anyone without their consent — but here’s Vulture accurately recounting this moment in time:
More than anything, the video is cringey not only because of its vacuity but because it recalls a distinctly 2010s era of social media, one when famous people simply being in the same room together was cause for universal applause. Consider Ellen DeGeneres’s star-studded 2014 Oscars selfie, which became the most reposted tweet in history despite being an ad for Samsung and was met with squeals of delight from the rest of the internet. There was still an element of novelty in celebrities coming together to show their “normal” side on Instagram and Twitter while simultaneously endearing themselves to audiences who found them more relatable than ever.
Inspired by Gal “enough champagne to fill the Nile!” Gadot’s efforts, I also spent the back-half of March 2020 gathering my own friends — celebrities in their own right — to cover another song we thought might be equally healing. Here, in uncut form, is Starship’s “We Built This City” (Henning’s Version):
SHOUT OUT to all the singers who brought this to life: Gilli Messer, Baily Hancock Glick, Sherry and Vivian Catlett-Liu, Anthony Lombardo, Rivers Dickson, Lindsey Haun, BB-8, Christine Casagrande, Paul Vaillancourt and Lindsey Stoddart, Connor Rohan, Madeline and Steven Tartakovsky, Brian Wright, Tom Dickson, Clay Flaten, Grace King, BB-8 again, and Carly Fog
the “wood” anniversary, an easy layup for any husband looking to make a boner joke
or 54, in Internet years