My lovely wife and I were recently watching old music videos on Apple Music on AppleTV and came across Vanilla Ice’s video for his hit song “Ice, Ice Baby”.
If you don’t remember this song, then a) WTF is wrong with you? and b) it’s that 90s song that sounds like Queen’s “Under Pressure”, but with, as Vanilla Ice explains it, with an extra “little bitty” ding:
What always struck me about this video is that, despite Vanilla Ice referencing Miami (A1A) and his oft-claimed “Miami credentials”, Ice was a product of Dallas-area suburbia (though he did, I’ll grant, live for a brief stint in Miami-Dade while growing up), having lived and graduated from R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, Texas, and is there most-famous alumni. That said, their “Notable AlumnI” list is more of a “Who?” than a “Who’s Who?“.
If you grew up in the DFW-area (or, in my case, DFW-adjacent-area) in the late 80s/early 90s, there’s a greater-than-zero-chance that you have a story that relates to Robbie Van Winkle, as Vanilla Ice was known at the time.
My wife, for instance, recounted a story about him borrowing her friend’s skateboard, trying to show off, and promptly “busting his ass”. As for myself, a girl in my high school class’ sister dated one of his “crew”, but moved back home a few months before “Ice Ice Baby” got picked up by the music tastemakers and subsequently became the fastest-selling rap/hip-hop single of all time.
At any rate, the music video wasn’t shot in Miami as you might think; instead, it’s clearly shot in Dallas. Far from A1A/Beachfront Avenue, Sonny Crockett and the Golden Girls’ lanai. I hadn’t seen the video in literal decades, but the distinctive skyline of Dallas had always stuck in my mind and, upon this viewing, idly wondered where it had been shot.
But, first things first, it’s hard to take these guys seriously when they look like waiters:
So, I decided to do some forensics.
First, I need a local copy of the video for research, so I didn’t need to try to scrub through the Youtube version repeatedly. For this, I used youtube-dl to grab a copy from YouTube. (If you want a GUI for ytdl, then the excellent Open Video Downloader works great.).
Then, for research reasons, I decided that having the individual frames from the video would be helpful. So I used FFMPEG to extract all the frames from the video I’d downloaded using this command:
ffmpeg -i iib.mp4 thumb%04d.jpg -hide_banner
(note that I’d renamed the downloaded video to “lib.mp4” to make it easier to type)
Now I had all the frames:
The easy part to identify the location of were the street scenes:
This frame was a key clue. Although I knew, from having lived in the Dallas-area for 20 years, that this had to be the Deep Ellum neighborhood, the distinctive windows, rainspout and roofline of the building the background here was a the biggest clue. So I loaded up Google Earth and poke around in streetview for twenty or thirty seconds until I found it:
At the corner of Main and Crowdus, this is where a white guy almost as awkward as myself danced this dance:
My next task was to figure out where the rooftop dancing was filmed.
First, I found a frame with a good shot of the skyline:
Then, using my knowledge of the Dallas skyline, I quickly identified the buildings in the shot:
Next, we bring up Google Earth on our second monitor and just fly around a bit in 3D view until we find an angle that closely-matches the shot:
Based on this, it’s my supposition that this was shot atop a building at roughly the intersection of Commerce and Pearl Streets, at about the location that is now, 33 years later, occupied by the East Quarter Residences. At the time, that area of Downtown Dallas was somewhat industrial, marked by warehouses and Reagan-era urban decay.
Dallas has changed a lot since 1990. Vanilla Ice enjoyed limited success after “Ice, Ice Baby”, getting to dance with Ninja Turtles, destroy an MTV set, subjecting us to this semi-cover of a classic ‘Stones track, remodeling homes and never quite explaining what a “roni” is.
But he also left with this bit of wisdom: