Recommendations of the Editorial team
With “Staying Alive” ProSieben and Joyn a new format in the program that is currently unique in the world. There are actually real music legends like Whitney Houston and Elvis Presley on stage. At least we saw both of them in the first show, the second prank follows next Saturday (May 2nd) with Freddie Mercury and Amy Winehouse.
The highlight (which is strange for many viewers): They sing duets together with the No Angels, Alvaro Soler, Samu Haber and Sasha. Once your own songs and then those of the all around touched studio guests.
The production company Endemol Shine Germany does not want to reveal exactly how the illusion of the AI avatars works. People talk about the Cola effect, a secret formula. Allegedly, spectators in the studio testified that the avatars there too could be seen lifelike and not just on the screen at home. It is possible that they were musician doubles whose faces and voices were adapted for the screen using AI software. But here one can only speculate.
It’s better not to look too closely
But what struck more than a few dumbfounded spectators was the legends’ tendency to make the same movements and gestures over and over again. That made for an eerie feeling. The King always made similar snapping movements with his fingers, the swing of his hips seemed like a parody. The staged conversations with the awakened dead also gave the feeling of receiving an answer from the catalog of quotes.
In addition, Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston appeared lifelike in the first show, but only almost. You couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with their faces, something that wasn’t quite right. Is there a singer who could only fidget in a daze and always grinned in a similar way? At times there was a millisecond delay between sound and image, between sung lines and facial movements. In video games we speak of a glitch. Sometimes the images of the AI avatars on the screens shown in the studio did not match what was seen on stage. Elvis held the microphone in his right hand and in a close-up in his left.
If you want to put it badly: “Staying Alive” seems at times as if the stars had been revived from Temu.
Overall, there remains an eerie feeling that clearly overshadows the basic curiosity about seeing such famous musicians again. Nobody has to be ashamed of the sentimentality of the format. However, the fact that it seems absurd when, for example, Elvis Presley sings along to the one big No Angels hit in a shockingly submissive manner (“Daylight In Your Eyes”) and the show creates such an honorless equality between legends and celebrities, is something that you can’t really let “Staying Alive” get away with. It almost doesn’t matter if the audience chooses the duet of the evening at the end.
