Few people on this planet are better at conveying (or being rewarded for conveying, if you want to be a tad cynical about it) a sense of having a really good time as Jack Black, who can project clearly genuine enthusiasm about damn near anything—including his very long tenure in the title role of Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda movies. Said enthusiasm is, for instance, the primary commodity on offer in the new music video just released for the animated feature, in which Tenacious D (a.k.a., Black and long-time collaborator Kyle Gass) bust out an extremely bearded cover of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” for the soundtrack of Kung Fu Panda 4.
Now, we will point out that it’s a little weird to imagine Black’s character Po, as amiable a lump as Western animation has ever produced, begging someone to tell him “how they want it to be” in plaintive tones of adolescent hormonal longing. But Black and Gass are clearly having a ton of fun in the video, palling around with Awkwafina, Dustin Hoffman, Bryan Cranston, Ke Huy Quan, and industry legend James Hong—whose version of “playful roughhousing,” as far as we can tell, appears to involve pretending to repeatedly stab a knife straight down into Jack Black’s endlessly joyful brain.
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Kung Fu Panda 4doesn’t want “Only 69 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!” to be their final words, before being torn limb from limb by tweens desperate for more fun times with their old buddy Po?)