I Didn't Know It Was a Thing

[theCryptofishist]

Back in the 90s, I owned a cd called "Stairways". It was a collection derived from an Australian television program call The Money or the Gun (and I have no idea what that means) featuring different singers covering Stairway to Heaven. There was an operatic version, and a Chattanooga Choo-Choo version, a faux Beatles, and I've forgotten what else. This cd is no longer in my possession, so my memory is a little hazy. (Since I had this long before I had enough access to the net to look it up on Wikipedia, I was convinced for a time that they were all the same band, covering it in different styles.) The one I liked best was some bizarre old Australian dude call Rolf Harris (how could anybody really be called Rolf Harris?) featuring a didgeridoo. (I think one did feature an accordion, but in some cases a didgeridoo trumps an accordion. I'm not completely consistent. Sad truth.)

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For those who weren't brave enough to actually watch this, it starts off "There's an old Australian stockma--rock band, dieing by trying. They get themselves up on their collective elbows, revert to their 60s instrumentation..." which just seemed like some totally bizarre Australian thing, completely not worth commenting on...

Tonight someone mentioned this song, which I looked up on a popular video sharing site...

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[theCryptofishist]

Oddly enough, this anecdote also has to do with the Australian/American cultural divide.
Australians had never seen the tv show "Dragnet" when they first heard:

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.
When it did hit southern shores, apparently, they thought Stan Freburg had been ripped off...

[BBadger]

Fixed (the above was a Google search result):

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[McStrangle]

"The Money or the Gun" was sort of like "the Colbert Report" or the "Daily show", And My 10 year old self felt very sophisticated pretending to understand it, thankyou very much. And that "Instrument" Rolf Harris is playing is a wobble board. One of the only instruments created in Australia that isn't a didgeridoo. We also invented the Lagerphone, which is essentially a stick with bottle caps nailed on, And the electronic sampler. So I guess you have us to thank for shit music.

The More you know!

[theCryptofishist]

I knew it was a Wobble Board (that came up in my researches.) I was just hoping that other people would chime in with their own experiences of getting the punchline and then catching up with the joke (metaphorically speaking) later, without warning.
Thanks for the re-link, BBadger.