In BC (Before COVID) times, viral airline safety videos had fun with things like fastening seatbelts. Times have changed. 

Alaska Airlines gave the COVID travel era the new type of safety video we really needed right now.

The video above is a send-up of the 80’s music classic Men Without Hats’ ‘Safety Dance’. If you want to compare it and get a real blast from the past, here’s the original 1982 new-wave Men Without Hats’ classic.

Alaska Airlines’ version was released just before the holidays, and it’s already racked up more than half a million views.

Already aptly-named, the airline parody’s ‘Safety Dance’ lyrics speak to new safety protocols in the post-COVID age of travel.

“We can fly where you want to. We can leave your house behind,” sings a man with a British accent, just like Men Without Hats, “But if your friends don’t mask and why don’t they mask, well they won’t fly this airline.'

 

In addition to announcing their requirement for passengers to mask up, the airline safety video touts its own extra efforts to keep fliers safe, like hand-washing, and 'air that's clean and disinfectant machines zapping germs like an arcade space fight.'

80’s lifestyle references to arcades and first generation video games are matched with 80’s-style choreography. Actual, Alaska Airlines employees, including members of Alaska Flight Attendant Drill Team, who the company explains dance through the streets of Seattle for the city’s Torchlight Parade and other events around the country, rehearsed at home to participate in the (safe) video shoot in one of the airline’s hangars in Seattle.

Alaska Airlines’ ‘Safety Dance’ hits all the right notes of high school nostalgia for Gen X, who is the natural audience of 80’s music, as well as new fans among new generations of Millennials and Gen Z, right down to the masked pilot playing the keytar deadpan.

Until now, our favorite thing about Alaska airlines has been the ‘wine flies free’ policy that encourages visitors to the West Coast’s famous and up-and-coming wine regions to buy whole cases of local wine. We also love their charity work this winter, handing out free hockey sticks and balls to families in the Seattle area to get kids outdoors playing street hockey.

Wine flies free, hockey sticks for kids, PLUS a sing-along, 80’s nostalgia safety video that helps make us all feel safe to begin traveling again?

More and more, Alaska Airlines seems to be not just an airline, but a lifestyle. And our kind of people.