video #34: Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend

All I wanted was to just listen to "Girlfriend" -- mainly for the drum break that comes in at about the three minute mark -- but didn't have the song and figured the fastest way to hear it would be just going straight to Youtube. I wasn't even going to watch the video, but hey! It's animated! At first I thought it was just another AMV mistagged as the "real" video, one of hundreds or more floating around in the oversaturated sea of fan-edits on the site. But Mr. Sweet's mug popping in at 0:38? Yikes. Wikipedia confirms this is the real video for the song, though if I'd had MTV as a kid like everyone else, I'd have known this already.

The anime used for the video is Space Adventure Cobra, which one review describes as "prime late-night material" for MST3K fans. An obscure title today, though I'm sure it wasn't an easier for Americans to find back in 1991 (no VHS release until 1998, it seems). Matthew Sweet... true otaku or just ahead of his time?