Spoilers are not just fun and convenient. They are, in this oft-troubled and unsteady world, an absolute good. They can save viewers countless hours by telling them in advance exactly how movies and TV shows turn out. No more slogging through endless plot twists, dialogue, and that old bugaboo character development. Just skip right to the resolution and experience all the closure with none of the commitment. And blurting out movie and TV spoilers during a casual conversation is a great way to irritate really pretentious, overly sensitive people who want their viewing experience to be “pure” and unsullied by foreknowledge. Perhaps the only way to improve upon spoilers would be to gather a whole bunch of them in one place, condense them down to three minutes or so, and set them to an indelible melody by the incomparable songsmith William Martin “Billy” Joel, himself a national treasure.
As fate would have it, such a feat has already been accomplished and is now available for public consumption. In a video simply entitled “Spoiler Alert,” YouTuber Jon Lefkovitz sings a succession of movie and TV spoilers to the tune of “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Instead of lyrics about Wheel Of Fortune, Sally Ride, and heavy metal suicide, this new version gives away crucial plot details about The Matrix, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Sixth Sense, The Godfather Part II, Citizen Kane, and more. Sample, spoiler-heavy lyrics: “Woody’s dumped by Annie Hall / Travis Bickle kills them all / Jason Biggs humps apple pies / Ship goes down and Leo dies.” Those four lines alone will potentially save the average viewer 513 minutes.