WHAT IF… Soul Train's animated locomotive raced against the Neighborhood Trolley from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood?

Superman: The Animated Series once pitted super-fast Superman against the equally super-fast Flash in a charity footrace that got interrupted by a supervillain's plot to make the sky rain cats and dogs or some shit. When Supes and The Flash resumed their around-the-world race after saving the weather together, the episode left the race unresolved. Nerds everywhere must have hurled their Hot Pockets at the TV screen in frustration--this must have been their equivalent of the famously infuriating Sopranos series finale ending (pre-Battlestar Galactica/Lost, of course)--but I thought concluding the race on an ambiguous note was a brilliant, post-show-discussion-sparking move.

Soul Train's recent re-emergence as a trending topic due to Don Cornelius' death has got me thinking which lovable TV show mascot from my youth would win a Supes-vs.-The Flash-style railroad race: the animated Soul Train itself or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Trolley?

For a locomotive, the Soul Train moves kind of slow, like the similar-looking Batmobile in the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton (who happened to start out on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as an assistant whose tasks included helping the crew with the Trolley). It's kind of difficult to build up speed when your chassis is swaying back and forth to O'Bryan or Shalamar.

Because it's much smaller and it doesn't dance (that inability to dance, even during its own piano theme music, means it must be really white), the Trolley is faster.





Even though the Trolley would win and everyone in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe would lose their minds, I'd still root for the Soul Train. I'd rather root for the not-so-white underdog who can't resist grooving to Shalamar.



Shit yeah, Cheryl Song! Represent!

And this concludes this edition of "Watch What Happens When I Sound Like a Discussion Someone Had with a Housemate While Sharing Some Indo at 2am."

Life should just be a nonstop Soul Train line

Though it stopped airing in first-run syndication in 2006, Soul Train, whose influential creator and longtime host Don Cornelius died earlier today, will never stop rolling, thanks to YouTube.

The news of Cornelius' death made me go look up clips of Soul Train lines on YouTube. Goddamn, there are so many clips. No wonder Spike Lee concluded his bittersweet 1994 coming-of-age film Crooklyn with a montage of vintage Soul Train line clips. The fly dance moves in those clips can really cheer you up when you're down. (You can also trace the history of African American dance and fashion in those clips.)

I usually avoid posting several YouTube videos at once because I never know when one of them is going to be removed from the site, and then your post looks stupid when it's left with this rotting carcass of a dead embed. Below are several of my favorite Soul Train clips that I've run into today, and they're presented in chronological order, from the '70s to the '90s. Many of these videos have been on YouTube for awhile, so hopefully, there won't be one that will vanish.

Interspersed between the clips are two of the show's various original themes. Those two chunes are the Soul Train themes I remember the most from my childhood: O'Bryan's "Soul Train's a Comin'" and George Duke's "TSOP '87," a cover of a previous Soul Train theme, MFSB's "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)."

The Soul Train dancers get down to Curtis Mayfield's "Get Down," so that means this clip comes from the show's first season in syndication (1971-72).



In 1972, special guest Stevie Wonder made up a song on the spot about Soul Train. He would have been an awesome in-house musician on Whose Line Is It Anyway?

There's video footage of Wonder's "Soul Train" song on YouTube, but too bad it's attached to Wonder's lip-synched performance of "Superstition." If there's one thing I dislike about Soul Train, it's Cornelius' Dick Clark-style requirement that the musical guests had to lip-synch their tracks (as I've said before, lip-synching on a music show looks so dumb). But Cornelius allowed Wonder to break that rule for this one number that's more genuine and exhilarating than most Soul Train performances simply because it's sung live and improvised.

New York magazine's Nitsuh Abebe called Wonder's improvised number "One of the warmest moments I've ever seen on television... it'd make as beautiful a eulogy [for Cornelius] as anyone could ask for."



The track during this Soul Train line is Earth, Wind & Fire's "Mighty Mighty," which places this clip in 1974. Hey, guy in the Afro and gray tux at 1:35, duck!



During this Soul Train line to The O'Jays' 1975 hit "I Love Music," YouTube commenters claim that they can see Jody Watley, who started out as a regular Soul Train dancer, at 0:17 and President Obama at 2:17.



Electronic R&B from the '80s rules. O'Bryan's "Soul Train's a Comin'" is my favorite of the many original themes that opened Soul Train.