Remember the late-'90s swing revival, when all the young hepcats were donning zoot suits and learning the Lindy hop? No? That's okay; it was a shortlived fad. Ask your parents.

Anyhow, one of the more interesting musical acts to emerge at the time was North Carolina's Squirrel Nut Zippers, whose quirky take on old-timey jazz incorporated banjos and violins and, well, it all sounds corny as hell in retrospect. But they could really play, man, and they were a fun live band. (And they are recording and touring again, albeit with precisely one original member.)

In their heyday, the Zippers only had one charting hit single, and we'll get to that later. First, though, let's take a look at the spooktacluar video for "The Ghost of Stephen Foster", directed by animators Matthew Nastuk and Raymond S. Persi (whose names you may recognize if you're the sort of Simpsons obsesseive who actually reads the credits).

It's not too great a stretch to assume that Nastuk and Persi drew direct inspiration from 1930s animation legend Ub Iwerks, creator of such classic shorts as "The Skeleton Dance"...

...and "The Haunted House":

Oh, and as mentioned above, the Squirrel Nut Zippers did have an actual hit single. In 1996, the band hit the number 13 spot on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart with the Halloween-appropriate "Hell".Here's the video, which looks like an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show as directed by David Lynch. (It was actually directed by Norwood Cheek and Grady Cooper, in case you care.)