Saturday!
There are two different Andrews Sisters songs in Fallout 4: Pistol Packin’ Mama (with Bing Crosby) and Civilization (with Danny Kaye). Getting beyond the whole “the past is another country” thing that you pretty much have to get beyond if you want to listen to the radio at all in the game, I found myself fascinated by the singers themselves.
One runs to the Wikipedia as one must and I was surprised by a handful of things. While LaVerne, the eldest, died in 1967, Patty, the youngest, was alive up into 2013. (Maxene died in 1995.) This means that Patty was around to see Civilization be one of the big hits in Fallout 3. (Sadly, I couldn’t find an interview with her where this was discussed, but I’m pretty sure that she would have been baffled by a novelty song of hers from 1947 finding a resurgence in a video game about a post-nuclear civilization. Maybe she would have been hip to it, of course…) In listening to their songs, I wondered if they would have been sex symbols of the era and it turns out, they weren’t. (Interviews has them talking about how servicemen talked about how great they were and how they reminded them of their kid sister. Along with much sadder stories.) There’s also the sad story about how they got estranged from each other after their parents died… and how LaVerne died so young from cancer, and the toll the new musical tastes took on the old ones… and their last appearance on the Dean Martin show.
And we’re now in a strange new place where their songs are being explored by the young kids (and some of the older kids) today playing video games.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “The Andrews Sisters singing ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’ in Private Buckaroo.” It is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 and although there may or may not have been a copyright notice, the copyright was not renewed. Unless its author has been dead for the required period, it is copyrighted in the countries or areas that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works, such as Canada (50 pma), Mainland China (50 pma, not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 pma), Mexico (100 pma), Switzerland (70 pma), and other countries with individual treaties. See Commons:Hirtle chart for further explanation. )
Still playing a game made in four days (sans art, of course.) The sarcastic music’s surprisingly good for “you just threw that together in 20 minutes”.Report
Link to it!Report