Most Extraordinary Craft

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Apropos of nothing but the strange head-space I find myself in this Monday morning I got to thinking about the fact that two of the most endearingly cheese-tastic acts of the 70s put out trippy tracks with atypical sci-fi themes within the space of a couple years -- The Carpenters' astonishingly weird song "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" was released in 1977; it was a cover of a song by the prog band called Klaatu (who're delightfully named after the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which will always be Evil-Dead-themed in my head since that came first for me).
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Thing I just learned as I wrote up this post -- this song did so well for Richard & Karen that they did a related TV special called "The Carpenters...Space Encounters" -- which is uploaded entirely onto YouTube (split into eight parts) because we live in an incredible world where nothing, no matter how bizarre, is more than a click away, and which you can watch beginning right here at this link. I must watch it immediately. Next up...

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... we have "The Visitors," the title track from ABBA's 1980 album, which I have always heard as a song about aliens coming to carry poor Frida off to their spaceship, but which Wikipedia is telling me is actually about "protest against the mistreatment of political dissidents in the Soviet Union at the time." Ummm okay? I guess that aliens wouldn't ring the doorbell so it was silly of me to read the song that way in the first place, but I'll never let it go.
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