For tonight's Moment of Zappa, I have found a surreal Hungarian cartoon titled Beasts, set to G-Spot Tornado and Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus.

It's probably NSFW -- not just because there are some nude figures who look more like the work of Picasso than actual human beings, but because both the video and audio are precisely the kind of weirdness that will attract unwanted attention if someone notices you watching it. (But there aren't actually any words, so no nasty Zappa lyrics to worry about, anyway.)

The copyright date is 1993, so Frank presumably got to see the completed work before he passed. Which is great, because this is exactly the kind of crazy shit he really enjoyed. He was involved in some offbeat American animation too, of course -- fans will remember his cameo on Ren & Stimpy as the Pope, and that he wrote the theme song for Duckman (hmm -- you know, I think one of these days I'll have to post that as a "Great Opening Titles" and "Moment of Zappa").

I love Cletus; it's one of my favorite Zappa pieces. It's precisely what he was talking about when he famously (and rhetorically) asked, "Does humor belong in music?" Because he didn't just mean funny lyrics -- he meant funny sounds. Everything from the tempo to the instrumentation is expert comedy; it's a funny, funny song -- and it doesn't have a single word.

I found the Beasts video looking to see if there were any good videos of Zappa Plays Zappa performing Cletus live (I saw it in concert a few years ago; Dweezil introduced it by noting that to the best of his knowledge Frank never performed it live). I didn't find any, but I found something totally unexpected instead -- somehow I doubt this is the last time that will happen on one of my searches for Zappa material.