There are plenty of Scopitone music videos (actually 16mm) on Youtube so it was hard finding the best one to present. Actually the reason it was hard was because there really isn’t a conventional ‘best’ one. All of them are lousy. The choreography is amateurish, the photography garish and the conception of each number is, at best, squeamishly provocative–kind of like a 13 year old boys fantasy of a sexy dance party thrown by his older sister. One feels sorry for the girl dancers clad in spangled bikinis with feathers (for some reason) sticking out of their asses–the feather fetish is really hard to explain but counts as a genuine motif given its constant use in other Scopitones. In searching for the ‘best’ Scopitone I realized what I was really looking for was the most representative and thus the lousiest. But it also needed to be fun to watch–some of them are snoozers. So my choice was Jody Miller singing ‘The Race Is On’, with the go-go girls apparently cast as horses. I realize that some of the non-bikini clad cast members (not really dancers though they are marching in time) are meant to be race-track attendees doping out their picks on their race cards. But what about the two men who appear at the very end and are suddenly the focus of the whole thing? Who are they? The plainclothes fuzz? The producers son-in-law and nephew? Anyone who can answer this burning question will be amply rewarded by me…in another life.