Palette-Swap Ninja – "Reprise/A Day in the Life of Red Five" (2017)

Then Obi-Wan spoke

And I went into a dream

As you regular 2 or 3 lines readers know, this year’s 28 POSTS IN 28 DAYS! consists of a series of anti-Beatles diatribes.  (No more, no less!)

Sustaining an unrelenting vendetta against the greatest boy band in history for an entire month takes a lot of energy, and I’m not as young as I used to be.  So I’m going to take a brief break from my February-long anti-Fab Four smear job to tell you about something very special.

No, I’m not talking about Richard Harris’s recording of “MacArthur Park.”  (Despite what you may have read, I never said “MacArthur Park” was the greatest pop record ever – although I did say that it might “represent the greatest achievement of Western civilization since the Renaissance.”)

I’m talking about Palette-Swap Ninja’s 2017 masterpiece, Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans, an album that consists of every song on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with rewritten lyrics that summarize the plot of the movie Star Wars.

*     *     *     *     *

Palette-Swap Ninja – no, I don’t know where they got that name – is a two-man parody band “with a strong focus on gaming and geek culture,” according to their website.  

“We’ve released song parodies before, but nothing this ambitious,” singer/guitarist Dan Amrich said after the album’s release.  “Once we settled on merging [Star Wars] with Sgt. Pepper, we completely committed ourselves to turning these two sacred cows into the ultimate double cheeseburger.”

“We were surprised to find just how well it all synched up,” keyboard player and digital drummer Jude Kelley opined.  “[B]oth of the original works end in thunderous explosions – the Death Star’s destruction and the final chord of  ‘A Day in the Life.’” 

*     *     *     *     *

The boys have created a series of music videos that consist of appropriate excerpts from the movie accompanied by their versions of each Sgt. Pepper song – there are subtitles so you can easily follow the lyrics.  

Click here to watch the video they created for the final two Sgt. Pepper tracks – the reprise of the album’s title track plus the monumental “A Day in the Life.”