NASA Does the 'Harlem Shake' in Video Spoof
The "Harlem Shake" even has NASA dancing in Mission Control.
After rocketing to the top of the Billboard charts — thanks in part to its viral success on YouTube — the song, "Harlem Shake" by Baauer has now been spoofed by employees at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The video producers put their own NASA-like spin on the hit song.
"So you think you're having a nominal countdown when all of a sudden…" the NASA producers wrote as a teaser when it went live Monday (March 4). [Watch NASA's "Harlem Shake" Video ]
The 35-second music video begins in a seemingly normal launch control room when a young woman in a spacesuit enters and starts dancing for the camera. When the song picks up, everyone is suddenly dressed in costume and dancing to the song, just as you'd expect in a "Harlem Shake" video.
The Wallops Flight Facility, based on Wallops Island on the Virginia coast, is the center of NASA's sounding rocket and balloon science programs.
The Wallops video spoof comes on the heels of many different videos paying homage to the electronica sensation. The cast from "The Today Show," "The Simpsons" and "The Daily Show" have produced half-minute versions of the song and dance, as well as the entire lineup of the Miami Heat basketball team. In the Heat's version, oddly, there is actually a team member dancing in a spacesuit, while wearing mask of a horse head instead of helmet.
This isn't NASA's first parody video, however. Students from the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston crafted a "NASA Gangnam Style" video in a tribute to the smash hit music video by South Korean singer Psy — the original was YouTube's first video to garner 1 billion views.
To mark the landing of the Mars Rover Curiosity on the Red Planet, NASA employees from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. parodied LMFAO's song "Sexy and I Know It" with the tamer "We're NASA and We Know It."
Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
