Cucumber music videos: Accidents Will Happen and New Frontier

Cucumber Studios, set up by West Surrey College of Art and Design alumni (and Max Headroom creators) Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, was known in the eighties for it music videos. I'll be looking at two in this post.

This video for Elvis Costello's Accidents Will Happen was released in 1979. "Accidents Will Happen was... one of the first animated films made to promote pop music", wrote Elaine Burrows in her essay Live Action: A Brief History of British Animation. "Record companies provided a new source of sponsorship money for animation, until their attention turned to the pop video."






































And here's the studio's 1982 video for Donald Fagen's New Frontier. The video uses several animated sequences in various different retro-fifties styles, linked by live action footage of two cold war lovebirds dancing in a bomb shelter (above).

Here, a wireframe image of a road turns into live action footage.


"It's just a dugout that my dad built/In case the reds decide to push the button down"





The video goes from Soviet propaganda art to imagery inspired by nuclear saftey booklets. We later see pastiches of fifties advertising, UPA-style cartoons and modern art.