Gingerbread Land (1991)

Patti Hudson is "the Gingerbread Lady" in this low-budget how-to video featuring children singing, a weird yellow puppet named "Yellow," the eating of stray M&Ms and plenty of instruction on putting together a proper gingerbread house for a beginner.  It's strangely hypnotic.  Read more about her here.

Psychedelic Tomato (1969) from "Sesame Street"

Look, I have no idea.  Apparently it aired on "Sesame Street," but it's more like the trip sequence from a drug scare film.

FLASH SIRLOIN (1981) is a homemade, restaurant-set FLASH GORDON homage

Oh, sure, it was made for about two bucks on a lazy weekend in 1981, but Chris Maxfield and John Torretta's 8mm-lensed little fan film (using no doubt unlicensed Queen music) has a sense of exuberance and fun that plenty of similar homemade films today lack.  This wasn't done to get famous, this was done because a bunch of guys had a lot of fun making a silly little movie.  HARDWARE WARS is the clear inspiration.

Update:  From what I can tell, it seems to be shot at this place in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, which is still open!

PES makes a submarine sandwich

The idea of making things look like other things may seem like an easy trick, especially in the hands of PES, the animator behind great shorts like FRESH GUACAMOLE and KABOOM!.  In his latest, a butcher puts together a submarine sandwich out of decidedly non-sandwich items.  It's two minutes well spent.

McDonald's "Clean It" training video with a fake Michael Jackson and a lot of smoke

If you ever had the opportunity to make a corporate training video, you could go the boring route and make one with lots of graphs and people sitting at desks talking about things.  Or you could make one that will stand the test of time and be incredibly amazing decades after other training videos have been tossed in the trash. 

This is the latter.

Commercial featuring a dandy song about prunes

California really knew how to promote their fruits.  First, they made grapes romantic, and here, they utilizing Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" to sell prunes.