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Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

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Music video for Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
Screenshot from the regular music video.
Plucky as Linnell and Hamton as Flans in the Tiny Toons music video.
song nameIstanbul (Not Constantinople)
artistThey Might Be Giants
albumFlood, Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (EP), Dial-A-Song: 20 Years Of They Might Be Giants, A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity, Rhino Hi-Five: They Might Be Giants (EP)
year1990
first playedJun. 17, 1988 (695 known performances)
run time2:38
sung byJohn Flansburgh, John Linnell

Trivia/Info

  • Lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy, music by Nat Simon. Originally popularized in 1953 by The Four Lads.
  • Flans: "When we were recording the Flood album, we had bought these Casio FD-1 samplers. I basically spent a couple of weeks in my house recording every single thing I could figure out how to record and playing it back on the keyboard. And so all these things that you hear on Istanbul are samples, except for the violin solo at the beginning and the trumpet in the middle. The thing that sounds like an accordion is actually a melodica that's been sampled. In the 'Even old New York' part, it's a Coke bottle being blown into a chord. The song's got a very unusual texture." - from this interview.
  • Two videos were made for this song:
  • The official video features stop-motion animated papier-mâché sculptures by Mark Marek and hand-drawn animation by J. Otto Seibold. This version appeared at The Angelika Film Center Jan. 18, 1991 in a film fest about recent animations. The New York Times reporter called it "inane Fluff."
  • The other video features the Tiny Toons. The Tiny Toons video is partly a spoof of the 1964 movie, Topkapi (starring Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov). The movie is about a petty con guy enlisted by international jewel thieves to steal a dagger with a huge emerald in the hilt, from the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul (dagger replaced by Plucky Duck in the video). That movie is also spoofed in the Wallace and Gromit short, The Wrong Trousers (to get really trivial).
  • During live performances, Dan Miller almost always plays a long, improvisational, acoustic guitar intro before the full song kicks in.
  • Featured in the Simpsons episode "Mobile Homer," first aired March 20, 2005.
  • This song has been featured on the video game "Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 3" for the Xbox. The version of the song featured has been shortened to 1:40.
  • This song has also been performed by the following acts: Bette Midler, Ames Brothers, Katarina Valente, Eartha Kitt, Ellen Bernfeld, and Ska Cubano.

Song Themes

Cartoons, Cities, Educational, Geography, History, New York City, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, Questions, TMBG Remakes, Two Chord Songs

Videos

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Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is currently ranked #55 out of 825. (616 wikians have given it an average rating of 9.02)
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