LaDanian Tomlinson's Electric Glide: Just ...So...Good

“I read the defense. I read the defense. I read the defense.  I read the defense..."

If that is stuck in your head right now, you have surely seen San Diego Chargers running back LaDanian Tomlinson’s “Electric Glide” video that has been fluttering around the Internet the last few days.

Check it out.

So bad. But so bad, that it is soooooo good.

I am willing to bet that, like Lay’s potato chips, you can’t just watch it once. Yesterday, when it first hit the 'Net, I found myself frantically looking for a site that had not had it removed, as for a little while, it was harder to find than the video of a certain female ESPN anchor.

But now, I can bathe in its kitschy brilliance all day.

“Challenge that call (Not a very good call!)”

C’mon. That’s brilliant.

“Wave to yo mama (She’s in the crowd).”

The simple genius of this video is in its tacky, but intentional, technique. There is a simplicity in the lyrics and “dance moves” (if you can even call them moves, or dancing, for that matter). This innocence seems like it could have been conceived by a nine-year-old, but the kind of nine-year-old that is destined for commercial greatness.

During the “Challenge that call” sequence, LT poses incredulously and the word “NAW!” fills the screen behind him.

So lame, but so beautiful.

Maybe the creators of this video, which is rumored to have been created by Nike about two years ago, were inspired by the greatest tongue-in-cheek video and song creators of all time, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, from Flight of the Conchords. Their subtle genius can be summed up in their own description of themselves: "Formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a cappella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo."

If you were ever lucky enough to catch Bret and Jemaine on their short-lived HBO show Flight of the Conchords, which premiered in June 2007, then the parallels in LT’s video and FOTC’s style is obvious.

Here is a FOTC video.  Check out all the other ones on YouTube, too.  They are all hilarious.

While Electric Glide starts off by clearly mocking the dreadful sports team videos of the 1980s, it then evolves into something so much more. Something that goes far beyond parody.

Enter the background “dancers” (I think that is what they are doing) in jeans and T-shirts with lyrics from the song across the front, like “Hit That Hole,” or a random picture like a cartoon dinosaur. 

LT “leads” this group, which includes kids and several people who look like they may have been yanked off the corner while panhandling in San Diego’s Gaslamp District (the guy in the "Hit That Hole" T-shirt is destined to be an Internet celebrity), in very deliberate and clearly not rehearsed maneuvers that mimic the act of such mundane football acts as “Say Hi To The Wife” and “Take A Knee.”  So awesome.

End the entire project with LT clicking the off button on a super-fresh, circa 1986, boom box, and you have now witnessed the perfect, possibly unintentional, Internet viral video for the 2010 NFL playoff season.

In this era in which something is a sensation one day, only to have jumped the shark 72 hours later, Charger fans just need to hope the Chargers have a longer shelf life than LT’s Electric Glide.