To celebrate the release of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Roku hosted a Q&A session with none other than “Weird Al” Yankovic–you know, the “Eat It” guy! Needless to say, things got funny, weird and, yes, illegal!
For a short period, Weird Al fielded various questions from the Twitterverse, answering both humbly and humorously. Some of the topics he covered included the movie’s peculiar take on the biopic, how The Lonely Island almost played Queen, why he loved re-recording “Another One Rides the Bus,” and much more.
At one point, however, an Australian user asked Weird Al how he could go about seeing the movie, which isn’t currently available on the continent. And then His Weirdness proceeded to totally not recommend downloading the movie by any means necessary, writing, “Roku’s working on it. In the meantime there’s VPN (Very Probably No) way to watch it legally. I’m sure you have a TORRENT of other questions, but I have to move along, sorry.”
Adding to the humor of it, in 2006, Weird Al released “Don’t Download This Song”, a take on self-congratulatory charities songs like “We Are the World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” One chorus goes: So don’t download this song / Don’t go pirating music all day long / Go and buy the CD like you know that you should / Oh, don’t download this song.
In addition to the aforementioned topics, Weird Al also went into some of the discarded scenes (blame the Michael Jackson estate) and the missed casting opportunity of bringing in Aaron Paul, who beat Daniel Radcliffe to the accordion by more than a decade.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story has been getting strong reviews all around. While Daniel Radcliffe may miss out on an Oscar nomination, let’s start the campaign to get “Now You Know” nominated for Best Original Song. Why else would Weird Al oh-so-slyly mention the Academy in the lyrics?