"An animated film starring Tom Waits.

Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped - a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation.

The original live action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation. A total of 5500 live action frames were hand traced, caricatured, re-drawn, hand inked and painted onto celluloid acitate cels.

Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent and was created specifically for a video music market that didn't yet exist. But the buzz was out and we went on to create what arguably may be the first music video created for the new and upcoming MTV market.

A series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commerciallly, consequently catapulting it into obscurity... until now,thanks You Tube!

In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short.

To learn more about this amazing lost film, go to ....TomWaitsLibrary.com and Wikipedia"

More thought has gone into this issue than to the reconstruction of Iraq.

The rule desperately needs clarification. I feel that tapping your own YouTube account for posts violates the sifting ethos of the site. It is like fishing with the catch already on your hook. Or in your pants.

And keeping the rule basically as it is would allow me to poach the great discoveries of others with a lil' communication with some Sifters.

I also like the communal self-link queue or communal YouTube "SiftCabinet" page idea, even though the filthy socialism of it all would rankle some members.

Finally, this site has gotten far too ban-happy. The ban should be reserved for the worst instances of gaming the system and should not even be mentioned when a Sifter is merely being mildly sneaky and trying to preserve lost or endangered content.

Shit, what is wrong with you people... this is Tom Waits we're talking about here. He can even make this cheery Christmas song sound depressing and interesting.

If Tom Waits can't be a member of this club, I'm not sure I want to be either... *save

wtf??? Tom Waits is crazy!....

The world so needs more footage of Tom Waits with animals in his trousers.

I could almost imagine Tom Waits singing this.