Purple People Eater
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"The Purple People Eater" was a novelty song, written and performed by Sheb Wooley, that reached #1 in the Billboard pop charts in 1958.
"Purple People Eater" is a song whose style is very much of its time and genre, reflecting both the simple early rock and roll that was hugely popular and the public fascination with flying saucers and aliens. The lyrics tell how a monster (described as a "one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater") descends to earth because it wants to be in a rock 'n' roll band.
It was used as the basis of a feature film in 1988, with a cast that included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ned Beatty, Shelley Winters, Thora Birch, Neil Patrick Harris, Little Richard, Chubby Checker and Wooley himself.
The song led to the nicknaming of the Minnesota Vikings defensive line of the 1970s as well as the colloquial nickname (Purple People Bridge) for the Newport Southbank pedestrian bridge between Cincinnati, Ohio and Newport, Kentucky
The purple people eater reappeared in another novelty song, alongside another novelty-song character, but this failed to chart. "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor," sung by Joe South, was released in 1958; it was also released as sung by The Big Bopper on the B-side of at least one version of the "Chantilly Lace" single.
It is a matter of controversy and bitter dispute among fans of the song as to whether the monster itself is the color purple or if it eats purple people. This is actually simply due to a missing hyphen. If the monster itself were purple, the song would be correctly entitled "The Purple People-Eater". If, however, the monster ate purple people, it would be correctly entitled "The Purple-People Eater".
[edit] Games
In Britain in the late 1970s, Waddingtons produced a Purple People Eater game that was in essence a development of the Wire Loop Game. Players had to prise tiny plastic people from the metal jaws of an octopus-like rubber monster using small metal tweezers that were attached on a circuit to the base of the game. If the tweezers touched the jaws a buzzer sounded and the creature was deemed to have digested its victim. The player making the highest number of successful rescues was the winner. The soft translucent rubber that the creature was made from did not prove highly durable, and it is now rare to find the game fully intact.
The purple people eater is also sometimes seen in the roguelike computer game NetHack when hallucinating.
