Peter Gabriel Video: Real Rock & Roll : Amusements: ‘Kiss the Frog,’ a five-minute short, takes viewers on a lily-pad romp during a theater/ride called ‘the Mindblender.’

Peter Gabriel’s new short film is the very first rock and roll music video ever.

Lest that sound like severely outdated hyperbole, the terms “rock” and “roll” apply here in the literal sense--along with bop and stroll and tilt and twirl: It’s being touted as “the first video you can actually ride.”

And it’s a sure thing no one who witnesses Gabriel’s “Kiss the Frog” will remain unmoved, thanks to the miracles of modern hydraulics. In this latest entertainment hybrid, the seat-belted viewer is mechanically jolted into jellied submission.

No, fiber optics haven’t progressed to the point that this will make your cable bill go up again. And, yes, it does require a road trip: “Kiss the Frog” is bypassing MTV and playing exclusively in an 18-seat mini-theater that recently started touring amusement parks around the country. It opened for business over the weekend outside the gates of Raging Waters in San Dimas and will be parked there through Tuesday, after which it moves to San Diego’s Grossmont Center (Aug. 7-10).

What happens inside this theater/ ride--known as “the Mindblender”--is much like Disneyland’s Star Tours or Universal’s “Back to the Future” ride: Basically, you watch a high-definition video that fills most of your field of vision while your seat shakes you every which way but loose in sync with the screen action.

To some thrill-proof adults, this might seem roughly akin to the pleasure of watching MTV from inside a working washing machine.

But the video itself--directed by Brett Leonard (“The Lawnmower Man”)--is, like virtually all of Gabriel’s, a visually astounding, special-effects-laden clip bound to be enthusiastically received when it eventually airs on MTV sans the seat-rocking. For anyone who appreciates Gabriel’s video work and the approximation of assault and battery that better amusement parks provide, catching “Kiss” in this setting is a double kick.

Gabriel himself is absent from most of the 5 1/2-minute video, except for his eyes, which are superimposed on the computer-animated title frog. The short begins with said amphibian leaping from lily pad to lily pad--you, the viewer, hop along, natch--toward a sultry brunette in a slinky bodysuit.

From there it gets plenty weirder and dizzier (and occasionally tough to follow), as the heroine is pursued through water and jungle by the suddenly demonic frog and falls Alice-like through a series of psychedelic tunnels that apparently are his innards.

Never fear, kids: Having gotten an emotional colonic from the girl, our green guy becomes nice again, gets smooched and turns into handsome prince Gabriel in time for touch dancing.

The motion effects here aren’t as palpable as they are on Star Tours or the “Back to the Future” ride--partially because this is a music video with a lot of edits instead of a simulation of one single, swooping ride, and partially because it creates a much more artificial, stylized universe than those other rides.

But “the Mindblender” makes up by affording a much bumpier ride, because there are only two seats for each hydraulic-motion base, allowing greater jerky mobility.

The kids we saw it with earlier this week had obviously been through many times, even though each viewing requires a separate laminate pass. (They’re free with paid admission to the park and a Pepsi can, and on sale to repeat customers and non-Ragers for $5.)

The teen-age girls screamed delightedly through most of the video, until Gabriel finally came on screen, when they clapped along and joined with the rhythmic coda in ear-piercing unison: Jump in the water, c’mon baby, get wet with me .

This hybrid is likely to remain unique for a while, given the seven-figure expense of the video’s creation. (Palomar Pictures produced, Iwerks Entertainment developed the technology and took it on the road, and Crystal Pepsi is sponsoring.) But the compactness of the setup augurs well for a promised future of storefront theme parks with similar “ride motion” simulation attractions, possibly with music video tie-ins as well.

As terrific as “Kiss the Frog” is, though, there’s no one else in pop who makes videos as consistently inventive and watchable as Gabriel. And it’s all too easy to picture this technology being used again with less aesthetic results: Imagine the head-banging, body-banging possibilities of putting standard heavy-metal videos through the “ ‘blender”--and flinch.