Do you remember our second episode, with the morphing technology and famous actors? That short movie had cost $4’000’000 to produce. Today’s video, in quite a contrast, came in at $800…

Norman Quention Cook had played in a number of more or less successful bands such as The Housemartins or Freak Power (to whom we most definitely will dedicate a future episode) by the time he adopted the name “Fatboy Slim” in 1996 and went on to popularise the “big beat” genre. When the video to “Rockafeller Skank” was released, director Spike Jonze – who had been unable to work on it – sent Slim his own dance version, which the latter found to be so much better that he commissioned the music video for “Praise You” from Jonze’s fictional “Torrance Community Dance Group”.

And so the video was shot by Jonze and Roman Coppola without permission and in front of unsuspecting spectators (except for one: Cook himself can be spotted among the onlookers), who just so happened to be at the Fox Bruin Theatre in Los Angeles the night when it all went down. A flash mob – four years before the term was officially coined – who would go on to win the Music Video Award for “Best Choreography”. Including a grumpy theatre employee, who turned off the cassette player – which is why the video version of the song is quite different from the album one in that particular respect.