Watch the Avengers Fall to Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’
The Avengers are on a serious losing streak. They couldn't stop Thanos from eliminating half of the universe's population last summer, and last night they were unable to make Jimmy Fallon funny.
The stars of the Marvel cinematic universe gamely participated in a remake of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" video. But instead of chronicling our culture's important sociological and political turning points, as Joel did in his 1989 hit single, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth recapped the plot lines of every Marvel movie since 2008's Iron Man.
You can watch the video below.
In a way, it's good to know that even our most famous and richest movie stars have to eat it and pretend to like it at work once in a while. There's no wit or insight, or even a point, to any of this. Even the Stan Lee tribute at the end feels tacked on, pandering and overly calculated.
Then again, if you ask Joel, it's partly his fault the Avengers don't have much to work with here. "It’s the same thing verse after verse, just the words change — na na na, na na na, na na na na na na," he told a Toronto audience after messing up the lyrics during a live performance in 2014. "One of the worst melodies I ever wrote. All you gotta do is fuck up one word in the song and it’s a train wreck."
You can watch that moment below.
Hopefully Thor, Iron Man and the Hulk fare better this weekend, when their highly anticipated Avengers: Endgame opens at every single theater in the galaxy.