Exclamations

If I ran a game store I would play Exclamations by the Brobdingnagian Bards.

When I was a kid, every now and then during Saturday morning cartoons a commercial was removed and replaced with a cartoon music video from Schoolhouse Rock!. The songs were all super catchy and the cartoons were very cartoony and paired together they were magical to me. The song Exclamations is a parody of the Schoolhouse Rock! song, Interjections. Grammatically speaking, an exclamation is a type of interjection so the parody remains quite true to the original, with both songs being about the parts of speech.

Exclamations is a song written by David Keefer of Maryland-based band Boogie Knights. It's become something of a filk standard and there are many versions on YouTube sung by various artists at various conventions. The Brobdingnagian Bards' version had its lyrics doctored by Andrew McKee (of "the Bards") to be a bit more sci-fi and bit less French, and still very FLGS-worthy. They play their version on an auto-harp with Marc Gunn doing the singing and McKee doing the exclaiming.

Exclamations by the Brobdingnagian Bards was released on The FuMP in summer of 2007 and was released on the album, The FuMP Volume 3 not long after.

Exclamations on Google Play

Duet with a Klingon

If I ran a game store I would play the song Duet with a Klingon by Carla Ulbrich.

Duet with a Klingon is a parody of George Gershwin's classic Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, but instead of two people bickering about pronunciation it's sung by an Earthling and a Klingon facing a language barrier. The song works because it's a wry twist on something classic. It feels like Ulbrich is sneaking around the museum, hanging mustaches on all the statues. The song is fun, it's geeky, and the Klingon language is pretty solid. There are some purposeful errors in the translation, though, because when the song was written not all the proper translations could be made (i.e. the word "banana" didn't exist in Klingon at the time).

The song was written by Carla Ulbrich. It was released as both a live version and studio version on her 2009 album, Live from Outer Space. There are many live performances of the song on YouTube as well. I prefer the studio version. Carla Ulbrich sings the part of the human and her husband, Joe Giacoio, sings the part of the Klingon.

Duet with a Klingon (studio version) on CDBaby