Katy Perry – Roar

The story

Plane crash. Useless boyfriend gets attacked by a tiger. Katy Perry is stranded in the jungle and does what anyone would: adapts, wins over the wildlife and tames the tiger with a cat toy. Then she wakes up back on the plane. All a dream. Probably.

Directors Grady Hall – the same guy behind Capital Cities' Safe and Sound – and Mark Kudsi of Motion Theory started from a one-line pitch: Katy Perry, Queen of the Jungle. They shot for three days in August 2013 at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, about 13 miles north of downtown, then spent post-production making, in Hall's words, the middle of L.A. look like the middle of the Amazon. About 139 effects shots. The animals were real, though – a trained tiger tethered to a steel cable, a capuchin monkey and an elephant who ad-libbed by grabbing Katy's dress and twirling it over her head. PETA complained anyway. The American Humane Association, which had people on set, said no animals were harmed.

Roar was the lead single from Prism, an anthem about finding your voice after years of being stepped on. It hit number one in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and a pile of other countries, earned two Grammy nominations, and drew side-eye for sounding a lot like Sara Bareilles' Brave (Dr. Luke said Roar was written first). The video outlived the chart run by a mile. In May 2024 it passed four billion YouTube views, at the time the most-watched music video by a female artist on the site.