page_title: Mandatory Fun
section_title: Music videos
hierarchical_section_title: Mandatory Fun / Promotion / Music videos
caption_attribution_description: English: Dr. Demento at B.B. King Blues Club &amp; Grill in New York, NY on August 15, 2004.Photo by David Rossi User:Elvis9227
context_page_description: Mandatory Fun is the fourteenth studio album by American musician "Weird Al" Yankovic. The self-produced album was released by RCA Records in the United States on July 15, 2014. Yankovic had previously released Alpocalypse in 2011 and was touring in support of it when he first spoke of his next record. When he began to work on Mandatory Fun, Yankovic found himself listening to older acts, many of which he stylistically spoofed on the album.
  Recorded at studios in Los Angeles and Massachusetts from 2012 to 2014, Mandatory Fun contains twelve songs, which include parodies of songs by Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, Iggy Azalea, Lorde and Imagine Dragons. It also features original songs in the form of pastiche, imitating the styles of the Pixies, Cat Stevens, Foo Fighters, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Southern Culture on the Skids. Yankovic composed the originals first and wrote parodies last for them to be as timely as possible upon the album's release. Many artists reacted positively to being parodied; Williams remarked that he was "honored" to be spoofed by Yankovic, while Imagine Dragons advised Yankovic on how to replicate sounds in their original song.
context_section_description: To help promote Mandatory Fun in social media circles, Yankovic produced eight music videos for the album; one was revealed each day starting on July 14, 2014, a day prior to the album's release. Yankovic commented that "there is no more music television" as there was in the past, and that "the Internet [...] is the new MTV" that operates continuously. Yankovic came up with the idea for the video promotion of the new album about two years before its release. He felt that releasing a new video for eight continuous days "would make an impact because people would be talking about the album all week long". The approach has been compared to Beyoncé Knowles' marketing for her album Beyoncé which took advantage of social media; when asked if this video strategy was influenced by Knowles, Yankovic pointed out that his previous record Alpocalypse featured videos for every song at the time of release: "Nobody said to Beyoncé, 'Hey, you're doing a Weird Al, aren't ya?' So for the record, I was first."
  Although the music video aspect of Yankovic's songs had long been a part of his success, RCA Records opted not to fund any video production for Mandatory Fun. Yankovic instead turned to various social media portals including Funny or Die and CollegeHumor which he had worked with in the past; these sites helped to cover the production cost of the videos with Yankovic foregoing any video ad revenue. He chose to distribute the videos to different portals to avoid burdening any single one with all of the costs and work needed to produce them. This release strategy was considered by The Atlantic as a "web-enabled precision video delivery operation, and evidence of some serious digital distributional forethought" as it allows the videos to be seen by different sets of audiences for each site. During an interview on Fox Business, Yankovic explained his method of funding to Stuart Varney, who seemed to misunderstand the possible monetization of Yankovic's videos.
  The first music video debuted on July 14, featuring the song "Tacky". Produced by Nerdist Industries, the one-shot video mimicks Williams' own style used in his video for "Happy": It features Aisha Tyler, Margaret Cho, Eric Stonestreet, Kristen Schaal, Jack Black and Yankovic dressed in tacky clothes and dancing poorly on purpose while lip-synching to the song's lyrics about a person who brags on about his questionable style choices. The video was filmed at Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, previously featured as Julianne Moore's apartment in 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Yankovic specified that during each of the six continuous takes, he had to rush down five flights of stairs while changing his outfit in order to appear in the beginning and end of the video. The video for "Word Crimes" features kinetic typography created by Jarrett Heather, reflecting the song's theme of proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The "Foil" video, produced in conjunction with CollegeHumor, shows Yankovic as the host of a cooking show obsessing on the use of aluminium foil, suddenly descending into conspiracy theories; it also includes guest appearances by Patton Oswalt, Tom Lennon, and Robert Ben Garant.
  "Handy" was released through Yahoo! Screen's "Sketchy" channel, and it is presented in the style of a late-night infomercial with Yankovic performing as a residential general contractor; the video also includes Eddie Pepitone, Justin Giddings, and Ted Hollis.  The video for "Sports Song" plays to the song's theme, featuring Yankovic along with the Riverside City College Marching Tigers band performing a routine on a football field during the song; the video was directed by Yankovic with Andrew Bush and Brad Schulz and produced in conjunction with Funny or Die. The video for "First World Problems" was directed by Liam Lynch and shows Yankovic, posing as a "pretentious jerk" wearing a "douchey blonde wig", over-reacting to minor annoyances of a well-off lifestyle.
  "Lame Claim to Fame" is a stop-motion video directed by animator Tim Thompson, using a scrapbooking approach to show the protagonist's
caption: Dr. Demento, the radio host who helped to launch Yankovic's career, is featured throughout the video "Lame Claim to Fame".
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