Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • Anonymous

    Is that Elizabeth Montgomery!?!

  • sirkowski

    That girl looks familiar.

  • stevew52

    Definitely the inspiration for DEVO’s video. The song came first though and has nothing to do with a bullwhip, western theme, women or sex. As and avid DEVO fan, I remember Mark and Jerry (founders of DEVO) commenting on the song and video in interviews. They were frustrated at first because many radio stations wouldn’t play Whip It (incidently, one of my least favorite DEVO tunes) because there were rumors floating around that the song was really just about sex. But if you read the actual lyrics, you can see it’s a purely motivational song to fire you up and make you feel like you can tackle your problems. Very quickly though, this controversey made the song and the band even more popular, so DEVO embraced the stupidity or their oposition and ran with it. I’m sure DEVO saw this old b&w film and realized that this type of hokey, old-style music short was a perfect fit to tie the whole thing together. — and pay homage to this classic short film.

  • edked

    The introductory caption in the video was both a tad over-explanatory and was on screen waaaay longer than it needed to be.
    How slow are they assuming people are?

  • buddy66

    That’s a teenish “Bud” Brando playing guitar.

  • Anonymous

    Girl looks like Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.

  • LeSinge

    Yeah those skirts seem insanely short for 1944.

  • Marc Turnley

    Obviously an homage (of sorts).

    Don’t listen to the guy from Devo, they are notorious pranksters and untruthers.

  • Anonymous

    That’s Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched)

  • fancyfeast

    Is that Elizabeth Montgomery?

  • Anonymous

    Elizabeth Montgomery? She was quite striking and much better looking that the woman in this clip. Besides Montgomery was a brunette until after Bewitched took off.

    Check her in 1961 on ‘The Twilight Zone’.
    http://www.catwomanfan.com/tz/show/images/3two.jpg

    Montgomery jamming with DEVO some ten years before they formed:
    http://www.natom1.com/SERENA4~.JPG

  • Xeni Jardin

    Date-disbelievers, I’ll double-check with the archivists at Oddball, but 1944 is what they told us, and they tend to be very careful about date accuracy!

  • The habman

    A kind of pseudo Texas Swing mated with Kinky Whip Goodness equals a truly awesome find no matter when it was made!

  • Anonymous

    The girl looks a bit like Elizabeth Montgomery …

  • oasisob1

    Shenanigans! That piece of paper was already torn in half. The girl just let go of it at the right moment. I suspect other old-timey photoshoppery, too!

  • Anonymous

    It’s either not 1944 or not Elizabeth Montgomery.

    IMDb claims she was born in 1933. Quite the developed girl for only being 11!

    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000548/

  • Anonymous

    Oh! That Alan!

  • Takuan
  • AccordionGuy

    See? This sort of thing is precisely why I took up the accordion.

  • eti

    #21 anonymous FTW!

  • Takuan
  • Anonymous

    It sure looks like Samantha Stevens to me. She must have been cloned from Margie Beeler.

  • elk

    Director: “Ok great, now hang on to that trust, ok? Save that sort of ‘hey you fooled me’ reaction until about the fourth time around, then really lean into it. Repeated honest mistakes first, then real betrayal, Ok? GREAT.”

  • jfrancis

    Didn’t Devo get disinvited from some show for being misogynistic after the video to Whip It came out?

  • JPW

    My fave was when DEVO appeared on the Mike Douglas Show and Milli Vanillied it, with the unplugged mic cords blatantly coiled around the bases of their stands. . . .

  • oscar

    Interesting, because they’ve claimed that it was based on an article about a retired actor who ran a dude ranch and did the whip striptease as entertainment – and the fact that people mistakenly thought the song was about S&M or whipping. But there’s no denying the similarities to this film.

    http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=722

  • MrJM

    Rubs eyes

    “Is this real life?!?”

    – MrJM

  • Takuan

    whip it? Reminds me more of Winona’s Big Brown Beaver.

  • getbrett

    Maybe the coincidence is more pragmatic in nature. how else can you contrive a situation where a women is declothed by a whip? You gotta go C&W as anything else is too risqué and C&W means cliché central.

  • Xeni Jardin

    I see no beaver.

  • buddy66

    I don’t see much of anything … some gray images jerkily moving against a black background. No! There’s a cowgirl eating a banana … I think. Fail.

  • fbrusca

    The actress is Margie Beeler, not Elizabeth Montgomery.

  • yupgiboy

    Your clip made it to DEVO’s website. The quote therein…

    “We never saw this until now! Cowboy minds think alike.”
    - Gerald V. Casale of DEVO

    Gerry should know, he directed the clip! #34, you are correct, sir.

    (might wanna change your headline now since it wasn’t the inspiration for the video…)

  • Anonymous

    Those are some cute women. Too bad they’re all dead now.

  • gobo

    Wow, that’s risque stuff for ’44. Where was this shown?

    I’m not sure what Buddy66 is talking about. Video not working for you, sir?

  • Anonymous

    Well, that explains a lot. I’m not sure what these other posters are complaining about, that was pretty interesting. It looks almost exactly like the DEVO video. Those guys really were/are ahead of their time.

  • yupgiboy

    Though it looks similar, I’d heard the “Whip It” was based on a real ranch where the “entertainment” was the ranch’s owner stripping off his wife’s clothes with a whip. I think it was on the “The Complete Truth About De-Evolution” DVD.

    Then again, originality is the failure of the current unwashed masses to recognize the fruits of the past.

  • webmonkees

    I miss the USA network’s ‘Night Flight’, 4-5 hours or more of just weird videos and clips. Devo, of course, and I first encountered ‘Duck! and Cover!’ there.

    I wouldn’t have been too surprised to see that film on there..

    It was the boing-boing of weird film.

  • Anonymous

    Do not forget that color did not exist widely until the sixties. Anything in the fifties could have appear like this made on second hand equipment from the forties. Which may have been the case if you wanted to create some soft porn (well hardcore back then!). It does seem very fifties era like dress to me esp. the girl shorts.

  • Marcelo

    #4 –

    Soundies were shown in these big video jukeboxes that different bars and dance halls had. Fun fact, due to the nature of the jukebox the film on Soundies is usually reversed. Swing dancers looking for old footage on Soundies have to flip the image in a computer before they can study it.