Chubby Checker (born Ernest Evans, October 3, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. He is widely known for popularizing the twist dance style, with his 1960 hit cover of Hank Ballard's R&B hit "The Twist". In September 2008 "The Twist" topped Billboard's list of the most popular singles to have appeared in the Hot 100 since its debut in 1958, an honour it maintained for an August 2013 update of the list. He also popularized the Limbo Rock and its trademark limbo dance, as well as various dance styles such as "The Fly".
Checker is the only recording artist to place five albums in the Top 12 all at once. The performer has often claimed to have personally changed the way we dance to the beat of music, as when he told Billboard, "Anyplace on the planet, when someone has a song that has a beat, they're on the floor dancing apart to the beat. And before Chubby Checker, it wasn't here." Clay Cole agreed: "Chubby Checker has never been properly acknowledged for one major contribution to pop culture—Chubby and the Twist got adults out and onto the dance floor for the first time. Before the Twist dance phenomenon, grownups did not dance to teenage music."
Footage is from "Back Stage" a 1919 American comedy film, one of the last films that Buster Keaton would appear with Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle before they went their separate ways, Keaton would get his own studio, and Arbuckle got into feature-length films.
In this film, Keaton, Arbuckle, and others, work as stagehands, backstage of course, in a playhouse trying to help and in some cases, stay far away from the eccentric and diva-like performers. When the performers rebel and refuse to do the show, the stagehands, along with Arbuckle's love interest, the assistant of one of the rebelling performers, perform in their place- including Keaton showing his ability to do butterflies, no handed cartwheels, while in drag.
Several Arbuckle shorts use sight gags that other comedians elaborate on for other films. In Back Stage Arbuckle uses the falling wall sequence, a gag that Keaton elaborated on in his later films. A piece of the set falls on Fatty but a window in the set piece saves him from being crushed by it. Keaton used this gag in his first short" One Week" and much more famously in "Steamboat Bill Jr".
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