The Morning Watch: How 'Top Gun' Saved Home Video, 'Dawn Of The Dead' Video Essay & More

(The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.)

In this edition, a video essay explains how the release of Top Gun on VHS ended up saving the home video industry. Plus, another video essay takes a look at how Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead has all of the trademarks we've come to expect from the filmmaker, and singer Natasha Bedingfield gives Strangers Things the cheesy theme song it deserves.

First up, Cracked takes a look at how the release of Top Gun on VHS ended up saving the home video industry at a time when video tapes cost upwards of $80. But when Top Gun was released, it sold for only $26.95, and it changed the entire home video industry for better and forever.

Next up, a video essay from Ryan Hollinger looks back at Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead and how it was an earlier indicator of the kind of movies we would get from the filmmaker. The AV Club acknowledges Snyder's movies as "overwrought, try-hard pseudo-auteurism and as pointlessly violent, incomprehensible messes," and the video essay looks at how Dawn of the Dead lives up to that reputation.

Following the new Game of Thrones theme song by Michael Bolton, the folks at Honest Trailers gave some other Emmy nominees their own cheesy theme songs as if the shows existed in the 1990s. This time, it's Stranger Things getting a new theme song sung by none other than Natasha Bedingfield.