See the Vintage Red Army Perform MJ's "Beat It"

Here are a couple of amusing videos to help pass the last afternoon of the working week. One of the latest trends in China’s hyperactive cyberspace realm is re-cutting old Cultural Revolution-era musical clips to match contemporary songs. According to ChinaSMACK, “In the middle of June of this year, a video was uploaded to the Chinese internet in which the video from a Red Army Orchestra performance was synced to Waving Flag, the song by K’naan used as the official song for this year’s World Cup Championship.”

In the last two months the trend has gone “supernova” with vintage Red Army clips appearing for everything from Queen’s We Will Rock You to various film theme songs. One of the best is this one using Michael Jackson’s Beat It.

ChinaSMACK has a whole range of other clips here. Be warned the joke wears thin pretty quickly though – especially since they all seem to basically re-cut the same clip.

Here’s the Waving Flag clip from the World Cup.