Michael’s Video Takes Beating; 4 Minutes Cut : Review: Jackson crams so much into his ‘Black or White’ video that it is an unfocused mess, but it has some incredible spots.

Kitchen sink salesmen everywhere must be mourning their lack of representation in the new Michael Jackson video.

The pop superstar crammed the proverbial everything but into his original extravagant, rambling, unfocused 11-minute clip--special effects, crotch-grabbing, racial themes, rap, random street vandalism, soft-shoe steps, friendly foreigners, creepy anthropomorphism, overexposed child actors, sycophantic cartoon characters, what have you.

What have you indeed? A mess.

Certainly “Black or White,” which premiered with great fanfare Thursday night on the Fox, MTV and BET networks, contained some of the most incredible footage ever seen in any video--and also some of the most mind-bogglingly inane.

Directed by John Landis (who teamed better with Jackson on “Thriller”), the video unhesitatingly started off on its worst foot with a domestic scene between grouchy father George Wendt and lovable Munchkin Macaulay Culkin, who’s upstairs playing his music too loud. Having been threatened by Wendt’s wagging finger, America’s cutie-pie hauls some massive amplifiers downstairs, tells Dad “Eat this,” and proceeds to blow him literally through the roof.

This superfluous prelude of pre-pubescent rebellion would be silly enough on its own terms, even if it weren’t almost exactly a replay of the famous opening scene of a video from seven years ago, Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Then the song commences, with an abrupt thematic shift from attempted patricide to racial harmony. Jackson dances in a variety of locales with smiling representatives of global cultures--and even angrily bursts through a KKK cross-burning during the song’s bridge.

The racial-themed middle segment ends with the most riveting sequence, in which multitudes of faces of both sexes and many nationalities seamlessly meld from one to another, like that old Godley & Creme video but with state-of-the-art effects reminiscent of--even wilder than--”Terminator 2.” All of America will have its finger on the VCR’s still-frame advance button trying to figure out how they pulled off this one.

The song ends there, but the original version shown Thursday didn’t. For the third act--now being excised (see accompanying story on Page 1)--there were another few minutes of Jackson--transformed from a panther into a real boy!--silently hoofing it on a deserted street, bizarrely climaxed by his taking crowbar and garbage can to a parked car and store window, respectively. Spike Lee might have been proud, but one could understand how parents might be a tad alarmed by this display of nonsensical violence by a role model.

This bit did have the video’s best joke, though: A shot of Jackson reaching down to his crotch--to pull up his zipper. So that’s why his hand has been hovering down there all these years.