Talk:Cosmic Ray (film)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Evrik talk 04:57, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

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• ... that Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray is the first short film to use a pop song as its entire soundtrack? Source: Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use: "Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray (1961) was the first short film to use a pop song as its soundtrack over silenced clips"
  • Reviewed: 155 Mercer Street

5x expanded by Hinnk (talk).

Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 39 past nominations.

Post-promotion hook changes will be logged on the talk page; consider watching the nomination until the hook appears on the Main Page.

hinnk (talk) 00:33, 15 April 2024 (UTC).

• (Not a review) It looks like the book is specifically saying that it's the first short film to put a pop song over "silenced clips" (found footage?), not that it was the first short film ever to have a pop song as its entire soundtrack. The latter definition covers an awful lot of musical short films going back to the 1920s. DigitalIceAge (talk) 03:17, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
  • Good catch, it was definitely nagging me how to accurately summarize that claim without basically quoting it directly. I think there were some similar claims made in other sources, so I'm gonna look through those again and see what the best way to approach that would be. As a fallback, there's the quote about the film "presenting the eyes for Ray Charles". hinnk (talk) 19:17, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
    • ALT1: ... that Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray has been recognized as the first music video? Source: [1][2]
    • ALT2: ... that Bruce Conner conceived of his short film Cosmic Ray as "presenting the eyes" for blind musician Ray Charles? Source: Looking for Bruce Conner: "I felt that I was, in a way, presenting the eyes for Ray Charles, who is a blind musician…I was supplying his vision." hinnk (talk) 22:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer still needed. Z1720 (talk) 13:55, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

• I like ALT1 as it is confirmed, interesting, in the article and supported with RS including the Boston Globe. The article is a 5x expansion so qualifies. The article has the correct inline citations and it is neutral. NOqpq required and Earwig alerts at 35% to a long quote. Bruxton (talk) 00:13, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

@@Hinnk, RoySmith, Bruxton, AirshipJungleman29, and DigitalIceAge: per discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Cosmic_Ray_(film), I've reopened this as I think there is too much doubt about the assertion of it being the first music video... as DigitalIceAge suggested, "this is a fringe view and too controversial to run as a hook". Either the hook should be strongly nuanced, or something else developed.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:43, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

(also ping Hinnk as above had a typo)  — Amakuru (talk) 22:44, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

• Can we just please write an WP:EDITFILTER which just looks for the word "first" in any subpage of Template:Did you know nominations and won't let you save it? Would save a lot of time. RoySmith (talk) 22:58, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

@RoySmith: First are interesting, like The first woman named to the Blue Angels as F/A-18 demonstration pilot Blue Angel fighter pilot Amanda Lee. Bruxton (talk) 23:14, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I was being (only partially) sarcastic :-) But, that's a good example of a first that's probably OK to use. There's a small finite set of people who have been Blue Angle pilots. And an even smaller subset of them are women. So it's easy to do an exhaustive search of all women blue angel pilots and see who was first. Likewise, we had a hook recently about some member of the British royal family being the first to fly in a helicopter. There's a very small set of people who are in the British royal family and everything they do is noted. And helicopters have only existed for a relatively short amount of time. So it's really unlikely somebody will come up with some other royal who flew in a helicopter earlier. It's the open-ended sets like short films or WW-II fighter pilots where declaring somebody or something to be "first" gets dicey. RoySmith (talk) 23:22, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

• If there are doubt with the "first" claim, can't we just go with ALT2? Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 00:27, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
• Striking ALT1 per above; review needed for ALT2. Bruxton? theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 19:15, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

  ALT2 is short enough and interesting, and is cited to Hatch 2012, an offline source, so AGFing. (I might have proposed something like "that critics drew parallels between the structure of the 1962 music video Cosmic Ray and that of a sexual encounter, with the former's Mickey Mouse sequence serving as the climax?", but I suspect this might fall foul of WP:DYKGRAT.) Good to go.--Launchballer 14:27, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

  let's roll! theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 19:33, 22 May 2024 (UTC)