Are you well? Are you healthy, and is your day going smoothly? Are you starting a work week or continuing one? Did you sleep well? Is there a god?
All of those questions are apt to be disrupted by this video from YouTube editor Robert Jones, which portrays kids’ television mainstay the Teletubbies performing Missy Elliott’s 2001 classic “Get Ur Freak On”:
Yes, here they are bouncing and eating donuts and moving in syncopated delight as Missy Elliott finds endless interesting ways to ride a classic Timbaland bhangra beat. The happy robot monsters are shaking their asses and going up slides face-first in the eternal daylight joy of their Teletubby universe. Are they happy? They are smiling, so they might be. Do they like to be forced to perform Missy Elliott? They are smiling, so they might be. Or perhaps they are merely damned puppets performing against their own wishes, their smiles a mockery of the notion of free will.
The video raises many questions, but offers no answers—only smiling television-chested puppets, bouncing to the beat.