Weird Al Unveils Lost Al's Brain Featuring Paul McCartney

“Al’s Brain”, a 2009 educational 3D film featuring Paul McCartney and a cast of comedy and entertainment names, has been released publicly for the first time since its original fairground screenings.

by Paul Cashmere

“Weird Al” Yankovic has officially ended the 17-year disappearance of Al’s Brain: A 3-D Journey Through the Human Brain, making the 2009 educational comedy film available to the public after it was shown at American county fairs and then effectively disappeared from circulation. Among its most unexpected participants is Paul McCartney, who appears as one of several people questioned by Yankovic about the workings of the human brain.

Yankovic announced the release on August 31, declaring the film “lost media” no longer and uploading the approximately 11-minute production to YouTube. The film was originally created as a 3D attraction for the Orange County Fair in California and was subsequently presented at the Western Washington Fair.

The project occupies an unusual place in Yankovic’s catalogue. It was neither a conventional music video nor a standard comedy release, but an educational film built around Yankovic’s comic persona and an intentionally elaborate 3D presentation. Its disappearance after the 2009 fair screenings meant that one of Yankovic’s more unusual productions remained largely inaccessible for years.

Paul McCartney’s involvement gives the rediscovered film an additional point of interest. Appearing in a street interview sequence, Paul asks Yankovic a seemingly straightforward question: “Hey Al, how exactly does the brain work?”

Yankovic responds by acknowledging the complexity of the subject before launching into an explanation that becomes the basis for “The Brain Song”.

The song moves through the brain’s two hemispheres, the corpus callosum and the four lobes, with Yankovic identifying the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes before turning to the mechanics of neurons and neurotransmitters.

The explanation is deliberately comic but follows an educational structure. Yankovic describes dendrites receiving signals, chemical reactions generating nerve impulses and neurotransmitters crossing the synaptic gap between neurons.

The performance concludes with Yankovic reducing the lesson to a characteristically absurd piece of practical advice: “wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, always, always, always wear a helmet.”

The final minutes of Al’s Brain form the music video for “The Brain Song”. The recording was subsequently preserved on Medium Rarities, a collection included in Yankovic’s 2017 Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of “Weird Al” Yankovic box set.

The film itself, however, remained difficult for audiences to see. Its original format was designed around 3D exhibition, including visual gags intended to extend beyond the screen. Yankovic also plays Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railroad worker whose survival after an iron rod passed through his skull became one of neuroscience’s most famous historical cases.

The cast reflects the broad comic and entertainment world surrounding Yankovic during the period. Alongside Paul McCartney are Patton Oswalt, Thomas Lennon, Fabio, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Billy West provides the voice of Norm the Owl, while Bob Bancroft appears as Norm Koslovsky.

Yankovic wrote and directed the production, playing a fictionalised version of himself as well as Phineas Gage. The format allowed him to combine educational material with sketches, visual effects and original music, effectively turning a science lesson into an extended comedy performance.

For Paul McCartney, the appearance represents another entry in a long history of unexpected television, film and comedy cameos. His participation is brief, but his presence in a production that subsequently vanished gives the newly available footage particular archival interest.

For Yankovic, the release also restores a missing piece of his work from the late 2000s. The project followed a period in which his music, videos and live performances were already established within mainstream popular culture, yet Al’s Brain was conceived for a much more specific environment: audiences wearing 3D glasses at a county fair.

Its return demonstrates how easily specialist exhibition material can become inaccessible once its original venue disappears. Unlike a conventional album or commercially distributed film, a fairground attraction had no obvious home-media pathway. “The Brain Song” survived through the later Squeeze Box collection, but the film itself remained largely outside public circulation.

The newly released version does not recreate the original 3D experience on a conventional screen. Yankovic acknowledges that limitation within the presentation, but the film still documents an unusual experiment in educational entertainment and preserves appearances from a group of performers who came together for a project that had no conventional commercial release.

The complete Al’s Brain can now be viewed publicly, bringing the project back into Yankovic’s catalogue after its long absence. What began as a temporary 3D attraction in 2009 has finally become part of the permanent online record of Yankovic’s work, with Paul McCartney among the unexpected faces preserved in the rediscovered film.