Synopsis

Fee Waybill plays a carnival barker inviting visitors to witness "the beauty." A young boy pays for admission and is sent through a surreal attraction filled with female performers, a mermaid, prehistoric women, acrobats, and The Tubes performing inside the ride. The boy repeatedly reaches for the women but cannot quite make contact. When the ride ends, he emerges as an old man, turning the colorful fantasy into a strange meditation on desire, disappointment, and the passage of time.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was originally planned as a much darker sideshow spectacle inspired by Tod Browning's 1932 film "Freaks." The band had reportedly arranged to work with the Southern California circus Circus Vargas before Capitol Records rejected the concept as too strange.

• The carnival-ride concept was created as a last-minute replacement. Fee Waybill, Mike Cotton, Prairie Prince, and Kenny Ortega had already developed the original storyboard before the record company's objections forced the change.

• Several visual ideas were toned down for MTV. A mermaid was originally topless, and a large paper screen depicting an airbrushed breast was softened with a fuzzy effect.

• The boy in the video was played by 13-year-old Alexis Arquette, then known as Robert Arquette. It was his first acting job.

• The clip helped make "She's a Beauty" a heavily played early-MTV favorite. The single became The Tubes' biggest U.S. hit, reaching No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock chart.

• The song's subject came from Fee Waybill's experience at a San Francisco Tenderloin kiosk where customers paid to speak with a woman behind a screen. The video transforms that uncomfortable encounter into an exaggerated carnival fantasy.