TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma – Students at Oklahoma’s only optometry college changed the music game last month with their video version of Vanilla Ice’s “Eyes Eyes Baby” – and were surprised when the rapper himself popped up in the frames.

The optometry-themed music video featured a cameo by Vanilla Ice, rapper of the popular song “Ice Ice Baby” that NSUOCO parodied.

Fourth-year Northeastern State University student Nathan Kuykendall led the charge and explained how it came to be.

“Each year, optometry students from the 25 different optometry schools around the country come together with thousands of optometrists for the national optometry’s meeting,” said Kuykendall. “This meeting features continuing education lectures, an exhibit hall, an assortment of mixers and the annual student bowl competition.”

This event features contestants from each school competing against one another by answering questions related to optometry and the eye, said Kuykendall. It kicks off with a DJ, a hype video and an introduction of each school’s contestant. After an hour of  questions, a winner is crowned as the national student bowl champion.

Kuykendall said the college that shows the most energy and enthusiasm is given the Spirit Award.

“The prize for winning this award is having the opportunity to film the hype video for the upcoming annual competition. This is essentially a parody music video to a popular song with the words changed to optometry related concepts,” said Kuykendall.

Kuykendall said students “go all out” to win this prize.

“At the meeting 2021 in Denver, our optometry school not only had the largest number of students in attendance, but also brought the most energy. This is substantial, considering our optometry school is the smallest in the country. Because of this feat, we were presented with the spirit award and tasked with the job of filming the hype video for the upcoming year’s event,” said Kuykendall.

NSUOCO students were provided with a production team to create the video. Several students, like Jenna Dougherty, contributed to music video.

“EssilorLuxottica hired the film company and we had multiple zoom calls with the team to figure out what we wanted to do,” said Dougherty. “We chose ‘Ice Ice Baby’ as our parody, Nathan and Tiffanie rewrote the lyrics so it was eye-related, and Nathan and Aubry re-recorded the song.”

Fourth-year NSUOCO student Tiffanie Nguyen wore many hats during production. She said the production crew was receptive to her ideas, including her vision of the intro to the video featuring the video-sharing app TikTok.

“The whole day filming was exhausting, but the whole production team and my other classmates made it fun. We are optometry students; we don’t normally get to showcase our singing, dancing, or acting skills, so it was fun to see all my classmates in a different setting where they got to show off their talents,” said Nguyen.

Dougherty worked on the dance moves in the video.

“Once we had the song made, I came up with some choreography. I started dancing at age 4 and danced up through undergrad at Wichita State University,” said Dougherty. “The other girls that danced in the video danced competitively through the years as well. We met a few times to practice the weeks prior to filming, and the Friday night before filming, we all got together to show the film crew.”

Dougherty said the shoot locations were chosen to showcase Tahlequah. The students picked the Optometry Clinics in Cherokee Nation Outpatient Center and NSU, NSU campus, and some of the murals in downtown.

“It was crazy to see how 10 hours of filming and multiple takes of the same scene could be cut down into a two-2minute music video,” said Dougherty. “We had an after-party the night after filming, and my husband Austin mentioned to the producers it would be cool to get a cameo of Vanilla Ice introducing us. They said they would see what they could do.”

The students filmed in May and did not see the finished product until they went to Chicago in June for the AOSA Optometry Student Bowl.

“We went crazy when we got to Chicago and saw the video for the first time at Student Bowl,” said Dougherty. “We had no idea they got Vanilla Ice to be in the video.”

Nguyen recalled the entire school rushing to the front of the stage to watch the hype video.

“We’ve all been so excited to see how the production team was going to put the video together, but also a little nervous because this hype video was about to play in front of thousands of optometry students and optometrists,” said Nguyen. “When the video started playing, all of our jaws dropped, eyes went wide and we shook our pom poms so hard because we saw Vanilla Ice up on that screen in our hype video. Hearing him shout out NSUOCO was the coolest thing!”