Cabaret on Broadway - Degree Commercial
The female cast from Cabaret on Broadway selling Degree antiperspirant. From February 2000.
NENA – “99 Red Balloons” | FreakyTrigger
. And to make it worse, Nena’s offhand, gamine bounce brought on that special pre-adolescent kind of “DO NOT WANT” where the “NOT” cuts in and out like a bad radio signal.
The version of her song we got – unlike almost anywhere else, the US included – is the English version, with the lyrics more rewritten than translated. The shift in emphasis matters. Both versions sing armageddon as a domino topple – once the baloons set the process going, the end of the world is an inevitability. But in the German version this happens with little human input – the people involved are tools of the process, and it’s a sad parable of a world doomed by systems. The English version is more savage. Here humanity gleefully digs its own grave, in a Strangelove think of you and let it fly
If anything, Tom, I’d have said the opposite about which version had little human input – in the English version it’s the “boxes of software” rather than human beings who take the balloons for missiles (we were told at school that early in the Cold War this nearly happened for real, only it was a flock of geese rather than balloons). And the war ministers and fighter pilots seem to enjoy the whole process just as much. As for the German version being sad, well possibly, but when Nena spits out lines like “fühlten sich gleich angemacht” and “Mann, wer hätte das gedacht?” she sounds pretty bloody angry as well. A cracker of a record.
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