See, this is the power of those portal sites. They catch your eye with stuff you wouldn’t have gone looking for.

This one described Britney Spears’ video for “Break the Ice” as “animated and futuristic.” My computer ordinarily lives on mute, but I turned it up because I thought the video would make more sense that way.

Curiously, it is the video that affected the audio. I sat through the animated version, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edhpwSMqc2I. Then when I did a quick search I found another version, a black-and-white dance number that I found profoundly boring. OK, the animated one is over-the-top action scifi, but it was way preferable to watching Brit and Co. writhing around.

Wondering why I tolerated the animated version got me to thinking about other over-the-top action scifi stuff I’ve sat through, movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Barb Wire, and then I remembered Heavy Metal, whose plot summary you can find here. All I can offer in my defense is that it was a first date in high school and I did not in any way choose the movie.

Regardless, I did not go running to iTunes to add “Break the Ice” to my shuffle.

This post originally appeared on ourMidland.com, the online home of the Midland (MI) Daily News. Republished with permission.