YMMV / Soul Asylum

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Unfortunately, some of the children recovered as a result of "Runaway Train" had run away for perfectly good reasons, and the video forced them back into bad homes.
  • Some of the missing children were ultimately found dead. One was the subject of a bitter custody battle, and was actually murdered and buried in their mother's backyard.
  • One child from the U.K. video was located living at a boarding house with an unknown man. But when police were notified, both had disappeared again.
  • Of the children profiled in all versions of the video, nine remain missing as of 2023 (not including those never found but officially presumed dead, like the last child seen in all U.S. versions of the video, Thomas Dean Gibson).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "Never Really Been," a song off their 1986 album Made To Be Broken, contained the line "And where will you be in 1993?" In 1993 Soul Asylum finally received national fame after years of scuffling on the indie scene, including an invitation to perform at the White House. They played the song the following year on MTV Unplugged, and the quoted line got a huge round of applause.
• Moment of Awesome: "Runaway Train" was instrumental in reuniting twenty-six children with their families.
• Parody Displacement: "Weird Al" Yankovic's "The Night Santa Went Crazy", made for his 1996 album Bad Hair Day, was based on the band's minor hit "Black Gold". The comedy song has certainly outlived its influencer when it comes to popularity. Oddly enough, there was a straight parody of another Soul Asylum song "Misery" on that same album, titled "Syndicated Inc.", that does not count as an example, as it is one of Al's less popular parodies.
• Signature Song: "Runaway Train" is easily their most well-known song.
• Tear Jerker: Some of the children featured in the "Runaway Train" video were later found to have been murdered, at least two by a parent.
  • The fictional scenes of "Runaway Train" have some tragic elements too, albeit overshadowed by the genuine tragedies of the real missing-kid photos. One little boy flees his home after watching his frail grandmother being beaten to death by her enraged husband, a barely-adolescent teenage sex worker climbs into the car of a horrible-looking older man, another young sex worker is gang-raped in the back of a van and taken away unconscious in an ambulance, and a tiny baby is snatched from their stroller by a stranger who drives off, pursued by a desperately-screaming mother. Shorter clips in the video include a small child accepting candy from another sleazy older man, more children fleeing for their lives, both children and adults with scraped or bruised faces, and children's drawings implied to depict their abusers or the abductors of their friends. Dear God...