Upsetting Day: Baby Rapper (Patreon)

Can a thing with no reason be a lie? Can an endeavor with no purpose fail? Meet Baby Rapper, star of 1998's Baby Rapper.

Baby Rapper is a dancing baby that does not rap, and he looks like… hold on, this can't be right. My notes say "the mascot for a Trump fertility gulag." I'm not sure what that is, but a dark visitor told me it's coming in 2032. Back to my point, Baby Rapper looks like the pattern on a snake adapted to trick birds. He looks like I could recreate his VHS box using only Double Dragon 3 characters.

1991 was a long time ago, so in case you don't remember, Double Dragon 3 was a disaster of a video game where one of the characters was a chubby guy wearing the same hat as Baby Rapper. So, okay, we know Baby Rapper looks like Double Dragon 3's beloved and remembered Chin Seimei's abortion, but what is he doing here? This is going to sound like more misunderstood prophecy whispered to me in the night, but he's here to lip-synch Beatles songs. Sort of.

I'll let the box try to explain.

What's more fun than singing Beatles songs? Why, singing Beatles songs, singing Beatles songs, of course! No one has failed at a task as hard as this copy writer trying to summarize Baby Rapper. Every person who saw this box had the same question. What the fuck is this? And every single person who saw this explanation had the same response. Fucking what?

There's just enough madness to not let any understanding take hold. As soon as you let go of the idea of Baby Rapper being a rapper and realize, "Oh, this is Beatles karaoke; Rapper is simply this baby's confusing first name," the box explains no, Baby Rapper is a gifted impressionist. It's not The Beatles, it's a 30 minute tape of Baby Rapper "doing" The Beatles for you. Again, what?

I'll let the box try to explain again.

Right, so Baby Rapper is a video to help children learn to read using the renowned "bouncing ball" method, but it's also a documentary except when it's cartoons. It sounds like something that would skitter through your mind while a nursing home attendant told you, "There is no point in resisting! My senili-tron is already destroying your memories!"

Maybe I'll let the box try one more time to explain.

Okay, it's also a party tape? Absolutely not. Never has anything been more cursed. Someone pried this tape from the clutches of a skeleton and it shrieked, "At laaast! You fools have seven days to market this or YOU become the next Baby Rapper!"

So it's a Beatles singalong for hip hop fans, young readers, nostalgic boomers, and parties. "Fuck it, it's also for the deaf," added the craziest goddamn maniac at the last minute. And they were either confused or a liar because this video is not "open captioned" for the hearing impaired. This video is the worst idea from a brainstorming meeting about how to turn $75,000 into a bewildering patch of landfill. If you were starving under a collapsed Radio Shack, making Baby Rapper would be your final, most desperate thought.

From nothingness he appears. Baby Rapper. His theme song starts, and it sounds like a below average studio musician didn't know if Baby Rapper was a lotion or a granola bar. It's a genre of music that exists in grade school plays and nowhere else, performed by a woman promoted from sales manager mere moments ago.

He can dance, he can sing

He can rap about anything

He digs music that moves his soul

Like rhythm and blues and rock and roll!

Baby Rapper, cool as he can be

(BABY RAPPER, BAY-BABY RAPPER)

Baby Rapper, cool as he can be

He knows his numbers

And his ABCs

The song is as close to the opposite of "rap" as a thing can get. It's something a church in the '50s would ban for being too wack. At no point is there any kind of hip hop breakdown. It is just a baby dancing to what's probably a repurposed hernia belt jingle. There's nothing overtly offensive about any of it, but by the time "Baby Rapper" is done, it will have occurred to most viewers, "Oh, they mean 'rapper' in a racial way."

To his credit, Baby Rapper does get after it. Look at this fucker go.

If this was all it was, it's not impossible Baby Rapper could have been a thing. A half hour of only this would be insane, but silly insane like a singing fish or a Pet Rock. I mean, why not? A dancing baby, sure. Except Baby Rapper debuted the same year as the Ally McBeal baby, and that thing was everywhere. It was already far more dancing baby than the public needed. In 1998 terms, releasing Baby Rapper the same year as the Ally McBeal baby would be like releasing a single called "Hork! Snort! Ptui! (The Penis Spitting Song)" in 2024.

1998 was a long time ago, so in case you don't remember, Ally McBeal was a show about a seventy pound lawyer who saw a dancing baby when she was fertile and smelled butts when she was horny. Anyway, as far as I can tell, her hallucinations and Baby Rapper were totally unrelated. They were made by different animators from different studios. It's impossibly bad luck. Baby Rapper was a deranged and terrible idea, plainly, but the one thing they could have expected was someone beating them to it.

After two minutes of dancing, someone trying voice acting for the first time announces, "And now… Baby Rapper is going to do his impersonation of… The Beatles!"

The box warned us this was the fiction being built, but it's still shocking to hear it. Why? Why frame what is happening here as an impersonation? Is the baby playing all the instruments? Somehow singing all the harmonies? That's not silly insane. That's insane like playing seven minutes of The Poseidon Adventure and saying, "And now, Baby Rapper does his impersonation of Gene Hackman alongside his impression of four-time Oscar winner, Shelly Winters! The big wave, as well, is all Baby Rappers."

The narrator comes back on and shouts what sounds like a mistake. "So come on, folks, let's dance along sing along to beatlesongs!" But, no, those exact words come up on the screen.

And that's all the rest of the tape is– Baby Rapper does dance along sing along to beatlesongs. It's both exactly how you're picturing it and yet so much weirder than you're picturing it…

The first song is "Paperback Writer" played over random Beatlemania footage. Baby Rapper's torso blinks in while The Beatles' names flash on the screen. "John! Paul! Riiiieeeeeaaaaiiieeeeeeee!!!!!" And we can see right away that even if this was a good idea, it was beyond the capabilities of 1998 mocap technology. Baby Rapper's lips only move every ten words, so most of it looks like a mistake. It looks like a mocap performer forgot he was wearing the suit, got into an argument with his wife, and then someone found the footage and said, "What the shit is this? We can't do anything with this. Wait, hold on. I've got it. Map his coordinates with Baby and go buy every Beatles song."

Speaking of The Beatles, what an absurdly expensive choice, right? This bare-budget mistake made by lunatics somehow got the rights to ten Beatles songs. How!?

I think the answer is they probably didn't. But in 1998 Michael Jackson owned the rights to most of The Beatles catalog, and the man doing all the sweet moves for Baby Rapper was a dancer named Paul "Cool Pockets" Guzman-Sanchez who was one of the zombies in "Thriller." So it's possible Cool Pockets called Michael Jackson and said, "Hey, Michael Jackson! It's Zombie #11. Yeah, you too! So I'm doing mocap on a pretty standard baby rapper straight-to-consumer VHS project, a– yeah, it's where they record my movements with a computer. So t– no, he doesn't rap. I– Michael, shut up for a second. I'm calling because I need a favor. Can I get the master use license for every Beatles song you own? No, I need it end of day, man. Th– no, Mike, okay, Mike, I have to go, just take care of it."

For "Penny Lane," Baby Rapper uses footage from a 1938 public domain cartoon called "All's Fair at the Fair." And like every decision being made here, it's both way too much and not nearly enough effort. They put it here because it's background stimuli that doesn't cost anything, and yet it's also cued up so there are robot barbers on the screen when Paul sings "there is a barber showing photographs." So it's kind of meant to narrate the song? The problem is, most robot cartoons don't sync up with "Penny Lane" for long. Which means when it gets to the chorus…

… "Penny Lane" is now a song about a husband and wife doing a couple swap with two robots. This entire tape is like watching someone get the shit kicked out of them in Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch…

… 1992 was a long time ago, so in case you don't remember, Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch was a video game where you edited Mark Wahlberg music videos, who was a rapper at the time, using violently random stock footage. I think about it five times a day every day, and it still did nothing to prepare me for Baby Rapper, the exact same thing down to the wardrobe.

Sometimes the random footage creates something beautiful, like when Baby Rapper sings, "Good! Day! Sun! Shine!" right when every meth lab in Stockton explodes.

"GOOD! DAY! SUN! SHINE!" Baby Rapper shouts again as the dead rise from their graves. "Glub, blub," say his lips to unrelated words. It's so hard to know how to engage with this. It's a throwaway karaoke video for a bottom-five Beatles song, but we were told to think of it like a baby doing an impersonation, and those robot barbers implied these cartoons are supposed to be about the song. Add in the fact that all of it, this entire thing, makes no sense. Why the fuck is this? Baby Rapper seems to think it is something, but what? And for whom? Watching Baby Rapper is like walking in on a serial killer before he's finished putting socks on his mother's teeth.

"Let it Be" has such a haunting melody, even more so when it's performed by the phantom of a tiny raper over footage of a crab fight. You know what, autocorrect? Leave it in. Next, Baby Rapper sings "We Can Work it Out", "Help!", and "Yesterday", and it never gets normal. What monster would still be doing this? Only a pervert would stand there and pretend to be a baby for a 7th straight beatlesong. If the creators intended this as comedy, the bit has been dead since the second line of "Penny Lane". And it's definitely not a tribute. Artistically, this is closer to vandalism. It's the sad partial memories of a man who got blackout drunk and tore the shirt off Chuck E. Cheese.

Maybe… what if this was a trick? Probably not, but I do think Baby Rapper would have made more sense and sold more copies if they marketed it like this:

Let's skip to the final song, "Hey Jude."

♪ Hey, Jude…

don't be a martyr

We are wizards…

killing a lobster ♪

♪ Na… na na!

Na na na na!

You're sentenced to deeeaaath!

By sooooouuuup! ♪

I've obviously given up trying to make sense of Baby Rapper. But I was curious about what was going to happen at the end here. Baby Rapper is putting too much into this. He was flapping his arms the entire time he lip-synched the saccharine, garbage "Good Day Sunshine," so I figured the climax of "Hey Jude" could kill him. And maybe it did! Look!

As soon as he gets to the part of "Hey Jude" where you're supposed to start shrieking "Judy Judy! Judyjudyjudy!!!" Baby Rapper writhes in pain and vanishes. Almost like someone who has finally filled an early model mocap suit with enough fluids to electrocute himself.

Baby Rapper never comes back. While paramedics in a 1998 music studio no doubt wonder what the fuck they're looking at, the song goes on babylessly…

… ending with a jumpcut to archive footage of all the rapping babies we lost in the making of this unthinkable monstrosity. Fuck this thing.

Special thanks to Pat Conway for Hand Claps.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ogi-Wan Supreme, the owner of the world's only "Baby Rapper vs Ally McBeal Baby - The Backyard Fights" VHS, and he REFUSES to share.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM