Korean Producer Plans to Make Saddest Music Video in World History

Music producer Na Jung-hwa has announced his intention to make "The Saddest Music Video In The World" 

"I think that Korea is the perfect culture to create what could be the saddest video ever: Koreans love their sad stuff -- I mean, even our teen sex comedies have sad endings -- it's one of the only countries in the world that thinks ballad is a musical genre instead of a type of song sung by bands that usually do OTHER things as well..."

"Boyz II Men thought that, too."

"Yeah, but they're a group, not a whole country.  You obviously don't understand our culture.  Also, somehow Koreans don't notice when something is cheesy, so it might actually make money here, unlike in other, more cynical countries."

"Cheesy?"

"Just look how popular Abba and Queen are in Korea.  Dude, people take them at face value here.  They think Mammamia was Meryl Streep's greatest performance."

"So," DokdoIsOurs said, to change the subject, "What will your video be about?"

"I've been doing research -- this one was helpful -- but for this video, we're gonna have to go above and beyond."

"For OUR video, I have an outline sketched -- I mean, we're working on every detail.  We're running psychological studies to find the saddest colors for our costumes; Hyundai was upset to find out that three of the seven saddest cars in the world come from their lines, all that Han, you know?  We've just recently discovered the saddest men's haircut is long and stringy on top, because it looks so good hanging down his face in the rain."

So who will be singing the saddest song in the world?  "Well, we hoped to make it a duet between Toni Braxton and the whiny one from Boyz II Men, possibly with a guest part by Meatloaf; we thought that would be possible, given their bodies of work: they all sing sad songs that cynics have called, "Over the Top," they've all done videos that tell impossibly sad stories -- it seemed like a match made in heaven -- but when they saw my storyboard outlines, they all balked, saying it was, 'embarrassing' -- so strange.

Tom Waits didn't answer our calls, saying he'd already dabbled in self-parody once, and wouldn't again.   Finally, after asking every singer in Ireland, we turned to home-grown talent, and found Kim ChangHoon, who already has what might be the second saddest music video in the world, after we're done."

 

Na was on a roll, so DokdoIsOurs let him continue, "So give me a storyboard."

"Well, all the backstory will be told with echoing sounds, in grainy black and white slow motion; there'll be so much backstory, to make the story sad enough, that we'll probably need to pause the music for a backstory break between each verse, maybe also between some verses and choruses, but we've got a guy, see, and he's raising his niece, because his brother died of cancer caused by a car accident with echoing screeching tires, but the niece is in a wheelchair -- cute, but in a wheelchair -- and she loves to wheel around a park near their house.  The guy sees a girl, and likes her, he stops her from attempting suicide on a romantic bridge, but she's got amnesia, in fact, they both have amnesia, so they don't realize they used to be married before some gangsters beat them up and hit their heads so badly that they lost their memories, but now she loves another man, so he can't be with her.  Then his niece, who has cancer -- did I mention that?-- gets kidnapped, and buried alive, and we've got this really great scene where he's digging in the mud in slow motion and screaming and trying to find her before her air runs out -- but she dies, after saying a few words to him and touching his face, and she has a really heartbreaking smudge of dirt on her cheek.  So the guy finds out that the killer is actually the man whom his amnesiac ex-wife loves, and if he turns him in, she will lose the man she loves, and probably kill herself, because that's why she almost committed suicide before: she thought he didn't want her.  But then, the killer plants evidence of the murder in the guy's house, and he has to fight his way out of a police station not one, not two, but eight times, by taking cute girls as hostages, who might fall in love with him, but they can never be together.  One of them dies because she forgot to take her medication.  Finally, as he's surrounded by police snipers, it turns out the head police sharpshooter is his long-lost father, and the father recognizes the features of his son's face, in this heartbreaking flashback where the father's wife dies of cancer and a car accident and an anesthesiologist's mistake during surgery, and he gives up hope in life, after getting beat up twelve times by gangsters, so they take away his son, and tell him he died, and put him up for adoption, but just as he realized that he's finally found his son, the police chief gives the "shoot to kill" order, and the father refuses to follow orders, so the other sharpshooter misses.  The father is about to call out to him, but in anxiety about talking to his long-lost son, he has a stroke, and dies.  But the father lost his job and his pension for disobeying orders, so his sister, who he lives with, never finds out that he finally found his long-lost son, so the aunt is alone in the house, and slowly dies of poverty after muggers steal all her ID and she doesn't know how to get more, so she can't get a job.  And she also has cancer.  The son is still in a standoff with the police, but then suddenly he crumples to the ground, and they discover that he had a brain tumor all along, and that's what finishes him."

"That's, uh, a lot of cancer," DokdoIsOurs said.

"Have you watched ballad videos lately?  It's gonna be tough to hit number one -- this might not even be enough.  We've got three pansoori singers working around the clock to find more ways to add a little extra han to the storyline, wherever we can, and we're trying to figure out where we'll put in somebody throwing away the books they're studying in frustration, only to be comforted by a friend bearing gifts, and a scene where somebody's running after the other person from outside the subway car.  There are a lot of elements we need to try and still add.  Possibly helping someone home after a drunken binge, or having a restaurant fight.  We haven't even fit in a house fire yet."

And when can we expect Korean music video to reach this new height?

"The release date is secret.  Turn on the TV.  You may have already seen it. . . "

(HT here.)

and here, for the robot video.