The greatest air travel video ever made has to be the “Southwest Shuffle.”
In December 1985, the Chicago Bears – including Walter Payton, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, and Jim McMahon – released “The Super Bowl Shuffle” where they rapped and danced in uniform, with each player having a verse about their role on the team.
They bragged about their dominance, but emphasized they weren’t doing it for glory—they were “just having fun.” It was shot in one day in Chicago, with a budget of $50,000. And it hit #41 on the Billboard Top 100, earning a Grammy nomination.
The video predated Super Bowl XX. The Bears called their shot with the shuffle and then backed it up by winning.
Southwest Airlines then parodied the Super Bowl Shuffle. Each Bears player had a verse. Each Southwest department got a verse. Bears used football bravado. Southwest used corporate humor about ticketing, maintenance, and customer service. Both were low-production, high-camp cultural artifacts of the mid-1980s.
This was an internal morale and training video that highlighted employees across all divisions—pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, gate agents, executives—each rapping about their jobs. It was shown at new-hire orientations, company events, and even made its way onto 60 Minutes.. despite (or because of) its neon colors, line dances, and awkwardly rhymed job descriptions.
In 2013, though, Munich Airport created a video that is unquestionably the best one ever by an airport with over 200 employees “from trainee to CEO” where they lip synced to “Come Away With Me” by The Donots. As they described at the time,
Parts of the apron were cordoned off, check-in desks temporarily withdrawn from the market and made a real hotel bed next to an airplane.
A couple of years ago I went looking for the video and could not find it. I reached out to Munich airport, and they told me that it had been taken down because they only had the rights to use the song for 10 years. I missed it by a matter of weeks.
Well, for some reason I thought I’d look again, and it turns out that a fan of the work had uploaded it to YouTube and that one is still there. And now I share it again with you.
It is.. magnificent. Or something. And it actually introduced me to ‘Come Away With Me’ which I much like, and listened to often.
What? No link to the video?
@George Navarini — I see two videos embedded in the post. Are you using Windows 95?
@George Navarini – video is embedded in the post!
Dang, first time I’ve seen this, amazing ! Clearly an astonishing amount of work went into this, it seems odd that there was very little promotion of the Munich Airport per se.
Epic! Don’t think any of them went viral persay but I remember seeing some airline employees including at Southwest do some unofficial “Harlem Shakes” way back when that was the thing to do.
Another great random airport video is the 2018, British Airways Heathrow baggage handlers choreographed dance video set to the Queen song “I Want to Break Free”.
i guess 2025s version of SWAs leadership forgot about the FUN!
It’s cool to see a A340
videos do not show in Crome but do show in Edge.
I loved this video the moment I first saw it thanks to one of your previous posts, so much so that after re-watching it many times over the years I downloaded it in 2021 for fear it would eventually be removed. The current linked video that someone uploaded is downscaled to 720p from the original 1080p. It’s a minor but noticeable visual difference in quality, at least to me. I’ll see if I can figure out a way to upload the 1080p version to YouTube.
I always wondered how to pronounce the name of the group, Donots. Is it Do-Nots, or Dough-Nuts, or something else?