A couple of months ago, I posted a bit about this meme. See, for example, "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs."
The running man in the meme is Arnold Schwarzenegger in his acting debut, as the title character in Hercules in New York. In the movie, the Greek demigod Hercules spends some time in, you guessed it, New York, where he befriends a Jewish pretzel vendor called Pretzie. Near the end of the movie, Herc and Pretzie are together on a viewing platform near the top of the Empire State Building when Herc disappears, having returned to Olympus. Later he gives Pretzie a farewell message by speaking to him through his radio.
A few days ago, on Christmas Day, an extremely obscure schizo YouTube channel I follow for complex psychological reasons posted a new video, with this as the thumbnail:
Of course I had to click. The video itself is very short (less than a minute) and doesn't include the thumbnail image. Instead it shows Pepe the Frog driving a tractor cab through space and then crash-landing on a shooting star. I looked up the song played at the end of the clip and found that it's the theme from Super Smash Bros., a Nintendo game featuring such characters as Mario and Donkey Kong.
On December 29, William Wright posted "Another Mushroom Planet, monkeys and bananas, and a deadly head in the Empire State Building." The "planet" of his title is the Mushroom Kingdom in a movie featuring Mario and Donkey Kong. One of the clips he posts from the movie has A-ha's "Take On Me" as a soundtrack, and he discusses that song and its original music video:
[W]e have a handshake between the 'drawing' man, and the 'real' woman, where she is then pulled into drawing-land (which strangely brought to my mind the LDS temple endowment, where people are literally pulled through the veil by the hand).
This juxtaposition of the temple with the idea of escaping reality by entering a drawing obviously syncs with the Schwarzenegger meme.
(Side note: As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I don't approve of "Take On Me." One of the things I have to teach students is that the object of a phrasal verb such as take on can normally go either after the two elements or between them -- take on an assignment or take an assignment on -- but that if the object is a pronoun, it can only go in the latter position -- take it on. Inevitably, someone raises his hand and says, "But what about that one song?" And don't even get me started on the McDonald's slogan! Grammatical reservations aside, though, one line from "Take On Me" has been a longtime personal motto: "Say after me: It's no better to be safe than sorry.")
William goes on to write about the Percy Jackson books, in which "the way to get to Olympus is through the Empire State Building." He mentions that the ESB has come up in my recent writing as well as his own, but I think he missed the fact that I had specifically written about someone ascending to Olympus from the Empire State Building.
In the same post, he mentions a sync regarding hamsters and the name Herbie. This got my attention because in my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert'" I had also mentioned the name Herbie in connection with a rodent:
Back when I lived in Maryland, . . . we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. . . . A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house.
The "outer space" messages we picked up on the old radio sync with Hercules talking to Pretzie from Olympus through his radio. In the same post I also mention "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven" (a phrase from the Book of Mormon), which obviously syncs with the idea of using the Empire State Building to get to Olympus.
The "Big Herbie" bomb, in case you were wondering, was about the size and shape of a coffee can and appeared to be made of balsa. At least, that's how it appeared in the visual images that sometimes accompanied the radio transmissions. I had serious doubts as to whether it was really explosive.
I suppose Herbert and Hercules are related names, each consisting of Her- followed by an element meaning "fame."
