Tom Hanks Revisits His Goofy Rap From 'Big'
By Nick Schager, Yahoo Movies
Tom Hanks is making the rounds to promote Inferno, his third film as symbologist Robert Langdon, the hero of author Dan Brown’s best-selling adventures who deciphers historical clues to stave off global disaster. For Hanks, that’s involved the expected — hosting Saturday Night Live, visiting The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where the late-night host discovered his inner Zoltar machine from Hanks’s 1988 film, Big; watch the highlights below.
But in keeping up with the times, he’s also embraced the new digital world, taping a segment for YouTube and emerging with a video clip tailor-made for sharing online.
While in Florence, Italy, for the world premiere of Inferno, Hanks and director Ron Howard taped an interview with filmmakers Wesley Chan and Philip Wang of the Wong Fu Productions YouTube channel. (Howard’s New Form Digital is a partner with Wong Fu Productions on the YouTube Red series Single by 30.) Wang, a self-professed Big fan, asked Hanks if he would join him to re-enact the “Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pop” rap from the film. Hanks’s pitch-perfect recitation of those rhymes (watch both the new clip and the original scene from Big below) suggests that he either has a phenomenal memory for scenes he shot almost 30 years ago or, despite the seemingly impromptu request, was able to brush up on the words for this clip beforehand. Whatever you choose to believe, the bit shows that Hanks hasn’t lost touch with his inner funnyman — or his freestyle flow.
Watch the original scene from ‘Big’:
Hanks’s Langdon will undoubtedly eschew any hip-hop performances during Inferno, which pairs him with Felicity Jones in a quest to stop Ben Foster’s billionaire geneticist from unleashing a bio-weapon plague upon humanity (in a somewhat extreme act of population control). Inferno rages into theaters this Friday.
‘Inferno’: Watch a trailer:
