Allegedly created by Patrick McBride and Dana Walden, this picture disc was apparently an official tie-in to the video game of the same name. Released in 1980 on Kid Stuff Records (KPD-6012), it sold itself with the vibrant, licensed images of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Baby Pac-Man. And then you got it home and put it on the turntable and realized what you'd done.
This record sounds like what happens when a couple of guys with no creative instincts go to college for music and graduate. Sure, they passed all their classes and turned in their senior projects, but they learned to mimic the textbook instead of Jimi, Eddie, or, hell, even Yanni.
Before it's over, you're bombarded by messy waves of early synth notes detuning over one another, verses that are half-instrumental, and a titular character that makes you think maybe Ms. Pac-Man is just a friend he goes clothes shopping with, when he's not stoned off his ass.
Note well: This isn't The Bloodhound Gang of the late 1990s comedically inferring Pac-Man is a crackhead. This is a couple of never-was studio musicians who were probably such nerds that they got ASCAP memberships for their Bar Mitzvahs, with an actual license from Bally Midway, inadvertently exposing children of the early 80s to a gay, stoner Pac-Man at the height of the property's popularity.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
So, light up a Power Pell-- er, Energizer and watch the pretty pictures spin around. Or laugh at the production value that makes the Super Mario Bros. movie look like The Ten Commandments. Enjoy wondering whether or not those ghosts at the end of side one are just Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys multi-tracking himself. But whatever you do, don't let this thing get in your head.
