A still from Anderson's 2017 horror film "Mario Kart: Tokyo Drift"

A still from Anderson's 2017 raceway classic "Mario Kart: Tokyo Drift"

A potentially-ongoing feature regarding certain songs that just seem tailor-made for Anderson’s particular brand of whimsical, pantsless whimsy.

You might recognize this song from Anderson’s 2011 thriller “Kong Air,” in which an incarcerated Donkey Kong teams up with his Nintendo brethren to hijack an airplane (Danny DeVito is especially good as a sadistic, foul-mouthed, brillo-chested Toad), threatening to fly it into the United Center unless the fractured relationship between Donkey and his gin-soaked father (Gene Hackman, at his usual best) is mended through a series of whimsical, beautifully-cinematographed scenes. This is perhaps Anderson’s best use of song to enhance the themes of his films; the obtuse lyrics, hangdog vocal tics, and overall sense of regret and complacence in “Freeway” lend perfectly to the film’s climactic scene, in which father and ape hold hands and walk down I-45, both pantsless.

Jay Reatard – “You’re Gonna Lose”

Featured prominently in Anderson’s 2014 Christmas epic, Home Improvement: I’ll Fix Anything. Tim Allen reprises his mid-90s role as television repairman/father Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, albeit fifteen years in the future, in which Taylor, now a vagrant, solicits “repairs” outside of Potawatomi Bingo Casino and sleeps atop his wife’s stolen clothes. The film follows a bumbling but well-meaning Taylor as he tries to reunite his family just in time for Christmas, with Reatard’s “You’re Gonna Lose” figuring centrally into the pivotal scene in which a pantsless Taylor apologizes to best friend Wilson for getting drunk and blowing up his fence and then doing the “ug ug ug” thing for like fourteen goddamn minutes. This dynamic tension is boldly highlighted by the regret and whimsy inherent in Reatard’s refrain of “yoouuuuu’re gonnnna LOSE! yoooooou’re gonnnna LOSE!!” – a declarative that may be directed at Taylor’s broken life, or perhaps at Reatard’s own tumultuous existence, or perhaps at the audience itself, who just paid 19 bucks (matinee price, because that’s how much movies will cost in the future) to see a Home Improvement movie that doesn’t even have Richard Karn as Al, even though nobody’s sure why, they just keep looking awkwardly into the camera’s lens and saying “Where’s Al? Where’s Al?!? WHEEEERREEEE’S ALLLLLLLLL?!?!?!?!” He just isn’t there for some reason. Weird, huh?