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The music video that added sex to the image of 16-year-old teeny bopper Britney Spears and changed everything in pop and celebrity culture forever after (jk, sorta) has been around now for 15 years. Filmed at Venice High School in the summer of 1998, Spears wears a schoolgirl outfit (her idea, the director says) and fantasizes a dance scene. Key lyric: "Oh baby, baby..."
Oh go ahead....you know you want to:
Director Nigel Dick looks back in a chat with the Daily Beast.
Well, I directed the wardrobe person to go and get wardrobe that I felt and thought kids would wear at school. And, again, being a grown man, I didn’t spend my time hanging out in kids’ schools. But you drive around, you see kids coming back from school, catching the bus, and what not. And they all seemed to wear jeans and t-shirts and have backpacks on. So we got a whole bunch of stuff like that. Britney took one look at all this and said, “Well, wouldn’t I be wearing a schoolgirl outfit?” I sort of went, “uhh, I don’t know about that.” Both my producer and the lady from wardrobe thought it was OK....When we made “…Baby One More Time” she was just one of the young kids on the set dancing. She just happened to be the one in front of the camera. We were on the school grounds for three days and nobody gave us any mind at all. “Who’s the video for?” “Britney Spears.” “Oh,” and then people would just walk away. And then six months later that completely changed. That weekend when the video was released, on Thursday afternoon she could walk into a 7-Eleven and order a Slurpee and nobody would pay any attention, and then by Monday morning all of that was gone and she could never go back.
The You Tube video? Only 84 million views and 52,000 comments (and counting.)
* Added: I'm told that, if you look closely, Los Angeles political consultant Michael Trujillo appears as a backup dancer in the video. He was 19...it was summer...no explanation needed.
