The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2 - Goodman & Buchanan

The Flying Saucer Parts 1 & 2 is considered to be an early example of the mash up. The song/radio drama is a parody of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast moving at hyper-speed with the attention span of a music aficionado gnat.

Writers and performers Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman tell the story of the titular flying saucer visiting Earth, and use short clips from various 50s era top 20 hits to help move the story along. For example when intrepid reporter John Cameron-Cameron (Goodman) asks a woman on the street what she would do if the saucer were to land, Little Richard suddenly screams out 'Duck back in the alley!' (taken of course from Long Tall Sally).

Mash ups have come a long way since these rough roots, but some things will never change: the record was immediately slapped down with a copyright infringement case. This lead to reissues of the song having different audio clips spliced in after the forced removal of many of the originals. Despite this the song was widely covered and Goodman and Buchanan would revisit the style and characters several more times (for example with the classic Flying Saucer Goes West) before severing their partnership in 1959.