Karaoke Videos

Behind every cheesy karaoke track was a surprisingly ambitious filmmaking experiment.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:44Speaker 01

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Vivian Le in this week for Roman Mars.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I was raised in a Vietnamese household, which means I was practically born with a karaoke mic in my hand. Birthdays, family reunions, funerals, Sunday mornings after the Raiders lost, all good reasons to whip out the karaoke machine. And one of the things that I remember most vividly during these formative mid-'90s moments was watching the videos that played during the karaoke tracks my parents were singing along to. They were mostly stock footage synchronized to the music. You know, people on a beach, people sailing boats, people in a hot air balloon, pretty generic stuff. Every time I hear the song "Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain," I could still see freestyle roller skaters weaving through cones in an urban park.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  These videos were like watching the equivalent of hotel art, something to look at, not necessarily something to think about. In other words, they were nothing like the karaoke videos that Brian Raftery was watching when he was in his 20s.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  I definitely remember nights and times when I was singing when everyone would just kind of turn their head toward the video because they were so strange and they're so ambitious and they're so weird. And some of them looked really great.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Brian is a culture writer and author of the book "Don't Stop Believin: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life." Brian's entry point to karaoke came in the late 1990s. He and his friends were living in New York City when they discovered a little dive called Village Karaoke. It was during these late-night excursions that he realized the karaoke videos playing at Village were on a whole other level.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Like the Benny and the Jets video, you could interpret that song 85 million ways, but the video we remembered, for some reason, was like a mom luring a bunch of kids slowly to a plate full of cookies. And I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with Benny and the Jets? No Benny, no Jets.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  It wasn't like these videos were unrelated stock footage just thrown over music. These were all originally produced short films, equipped with their own storylines, characters, and tangential interpretations of the song's lyrics. And there were literally thousands of videos like this.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  There's a very strange video that we used to talk about all the time for Paul McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory," which was really, I don't know if it's problematic or not, but it was like, there's a black man walking a white dog, and then a white man walking a black dog, and then they become friends. It is trying to be true to the spirit of this, you know, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder duet, but it makes no sense that it's a dog park.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Some of these karaoke videos were clearly bananas, but they were not lacking an ambition. Actors were hired, locations were scouted, lighting was designed, and a lot of them were shot on actual film stock. Brian wanted to know who had made these, and why go through all the effort?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  I was just kind of like, this is weird that like, this is a video that like, we're just here as a goof, and someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Hall & Oates song that we're all drunkenly singing in a tiny room.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  As it turns out, these weirdo karaoke videos were kind of their own micro-movement of filmmaking. It only lasted a handful of years, and is only remembered by a handful of people, but it gave a generation of aspiring filmmakers something that barely exists anymore: a paying gig where they could just mess around and figure out how to make stuff.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  It's about as close to an outside-of-Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Some videos were good, some were bad, and several were so bad that they were awesome. And I had to know more about where they came from.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  The story of these videos actually originated about a decade before Brian discovered them at Village Karaoke. Back in the 1980s, the world of consumer electronics was exploding: personal computers, the Walkman, camcorders, fax machines, the Game Boy. It was like a shiny new toy was coming out on a monthly basis. And Neil Altman wanted in.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  I basically was a sales and marketing exec, and I introduced a lot of products to the United States.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  One day in 1988, Neil was flipping through the New York Times, and he saw a job ad that intrigued him.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  And they were looking for somebody, for some sort of a startup in the East Coast.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  The company that put out that ad was Pioneer, the Japanese electronics corporation. They were looking for someone to head up a brand-new division specifically in America. Neil applied, and when he got an interview, his wife drove down with him to the Pioneer offices in Manhattan.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Well, you know, maybe two hours passed. I came down and I said, "This is really interesting product." And she said, "What is it?" And I said, "It's this thing called karaoke." She said, "What is karaoke? What is that?"

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Karaoke had been around for over a decade at this point. But back in the 1980s, it was still pretty unknown in the West. It was huge in Asia, though, particularly in Japan where Pioneer was headquartered. The word karaoke itself is Japanese, meaning "empty orchestra."

• 6:52Speaker 03

  You go to Japan, every little bar, there was 800,000 bars in Japan, believe it or not. But every bar had to have karaoke in it.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And actually, a big reason why karaoke was already so popular in Japan was because of Pioneer's karaoke technology.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  A few years before Neil joined the company, Pioneer completely revolutionized the karaoke game by releasing the first-ever karaoke LaserDisc player. For those under the age of 37, LaserDisc was one of the lesser-known combatants in the home-video format wars of the 70s and 80s. Picture a DVD the size of a vinyl record.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  And I've got one in my hand right now. It's a... this looks like an LP record. It's silver, and it has information on both sides. Okay, and there's 28 videos on each disc.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Back then, when home video was first emerging, VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc were all battling it out to be the dominant consumer technology. VHS and Beta turned out to be exponentially more popular for the home movie-watching experience.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And videotape won the war. LaserDisc only was able to capture maybe 1% of the market. But the video market is so huge. 1% of the market is very significant. So Pioneer says, "You know what? Maybe not so much for movies, but karaoke, yeah. Because nobody else is doing it. So we're all alone. So we'll take 1% of the market all alone."

• 8:29Speaker 01

  When it came to something like karaoke, LaserDisc had a superpower that gave it an edge over VHS or Beta. A LaserDisc could jump around to individual chapters on the disc. Again, like a giant DVD. This made it well-suited for searching for individual karaoke tracks if they were listed as chapters, like you would on a jukebox. It was a technology that fit the art form.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Pioneer said, you know what? For a karaoke application, this is perfect.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Essentially, all you need for karaoke are two things: a backing track and the lyrics to the song displayed on the screen. But when Pioneer manufactured these discs for the Japanese market, they also decided to include one additional element: a karaoke music video that went along with each track.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  I think that the original concept of using those videos in Japan was to basically sell LaserDiscs.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  LaserDiscs were known for having really good picture resolution, way better than its competitors, VHS or Betamax. Pioneer in Japan figured it would be a complete waste not to put a nice-looking video up on the screen. And Neil says when Pioneer decided to expand to the American market and get laser karaoke into American bars, they copied that same formula.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  They had a lot of success in Japan with it that way. And they wanted to replicate their success in the United States. And they felt that this is the way we did it in Japan. We got to do it in the United States the same way.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  But it couldn't be exactly the same. Those videos were shot in Japan, for Japanese songs, for a Japanese audience.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  You know, you couldn't have a song like, you know, "I Shot the Sheriff", with a Japanese video on it. It didn't work. You had to have a production company go out there and shoot the videos.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Which is how people like Nori Niven got involved.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  I always compared it to like that scene in Conan the Barbarian where he has to push that rock in a circle for like 10 years before he becomes a grown man, you know, when he's all strong. Because you shoot a million feet of film, and either you fail or you come out of it stronger.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  In the late 1980s, Nori was actually still in college. He'd been directing music videos for local artists when the opportunity to work on these karaoke videos fell into his lap.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Somehow, I wound up on a panel for music videos at Panavision in Dallas, and I'm like 20 years old. And one of the guys on the panel said, "Hey, I've got these karaoke videos. You want to come to shoot some of them?" And I would shoot anything. I mean, I love shooting film. And the idea of shooting music videos sounded really fun. And of course, I said yes.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Pioneer had a division called LaserDisc Corporation of America, also known as LDCA. They contracted production companies and directors from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, even London. And Norrie remembers early on, there was one specific directive for these videos.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  They wanted stories. So I remember they really wanted a narrative weave. They wanted a beginning, a middle and an end. They really wanted you to stick to the storyline of the song.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Brian Raftery again.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Because at that point, Western audiences, especially after seven or eight years of MTV, they knew that every video had to have either a wild collage or a very easy to follow narrative.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Pioneer wanted these narratives to adhere to the vibe and message of the song, but that came with one big stipulation. The footage used in these videos had to be completely original for copyright purposes. Pioneer only licensed the music, not the artist's likeness or any existing music video. So you couldn't reference their vision of the song.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  You know, if it was a song, if it was Thriller, they did not want you to do like the Thriller dance. They didn't, they wanted you to come with something original.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  There were, of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I know they did not want people singing. I think that's one thing is to have no one singing along to the song, almost like not acknowledging that it's there because the focus should be on the singer.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Pioneer also didn't want anything too violent or too salacious.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  I just had to keep it clean. So I had to be careful with, you know, nothing was too sexualized or whatever it was.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Saad Neshli was a producer at LDCA. She worked with dozens of directors during her time there and was a liaison between the higher upset Pioneer and the production companies actually making the videos.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  It was a wild time where you kind of had free rein. It was, it was scary in a way, but it was also really a lot of fun.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Saad said that aside from those family-friendly rules, they almost never got any creative notes from the company.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  I don't think anyone was probably watching them except for us.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Which also meant that the people making these videos had near complete artistic freedom.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  I don't even think that making a good karaoke video was the thing. It was just making good art, you know, not necessarily for karaoke. I don't think any of us had that in mind when we shot it. It was just making beautiful art.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But that beautiful art came with a pretty big limitation. Pioneer was a huge company with capital to throw behind these new karaoke videos, but not like that much capital. In the late 80s and 90s, the average cost of a music video on MTV could run $50,000 to $60,000. These karaoke videos, on the other hand, ranged from $3,600 to $10,000 because, well, this wasn't MTV. That budget had to cover production costs like locations, camera rentals, film stock and development, props, a crew, actors, and whatever payment you could walk away with for yourself. So these videos became a real filmmaking test of what directors could do with a micro budget, limited resources, and the creative wiggle room to go wild.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I mean, when the idea first came to you, were you kind of like, you're gonna pay us to do this thing that it seems very clear that do you really need like a high production video? Like, what were your thoughts when?

• 14:28Speaker 06

  Never even thought that, just went, oh, great, brilliant, yes. You don't question at all. I wasn't biting the hand that fed. Yeah, I can do that, and I like the sound of it. Let's do that.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  This is Nikki Smedley. She produced a handful of karaoke videos for Pioneer in London and has had a long career in entertainment.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  I started out as a dancer and an actress. I ran a cabaret club. I went on to be a Teletubby, and now I do one woman show for grownups, and that's me.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  You did hear that correctly. Nikki was one of the original Teletubbies. She played Lala, the yellow one.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  I always say to people, I'm not famous, I just had one very famous outfit.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  So yeah, that's what I did. People won't recognize, but they recognize the boy.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  At the time, Nikki had very little to no production experience. Her friend Neil was hired to direct some videos and brought her on as a producer and choreographer. I found her name on the credits for Pioneer LaserDisc Volume 307, which I was actually holding in my hand during our Zoom call.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  That, well, I think you've got ain't nothing going on but the rent.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I do. You recognize it from the back of the... Nikki instantly clocked the LaserDisc volume in my hand. It had a song for a video she worked on called Ain't Nothing Going On But The Rent.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  That's the first one that Neil and I did, working together.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  If you've never heard it, it's an R&B song by Gwen Guthrie about a woman looking for a man who's, at the very least, financially stable. No romance without finance is the refrain. Nikki and her director Neil, on the other hand, plotted out a different story for the video. It was about a couple who throw a house party in order to come up with money for rent. It's definitely a different interpretation of the song's original meaning, but it works. She broke down the process of how that video was planned.

• 16:20Speaker 06

  I would have a meeting with Neil and give him a general idea. We would talk through the different shots that we thought we needed. And yes, and start doing a bit of loose budgeting, coming up with what we need. And then at the same time, I would be working with the music and drawing, like I have like a kind of beat map of the construction of the song. And then we'd meet up with the cameraman and go, this is what we want. Maybe have to make or find some props. And then voila.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  It has the look of any British synth-pop video you might see on MTV in the 1980s. High contrast lighting, graphic wipes, glamorous melancholy. If you blinked, you might think you're watching a Kajagugu music video.

• 17:00Speaker 06

  And it went down so brilliantly well that they asked us to do more, so we started a little company.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  In order to keep things within budget, producers needed to get creative. They'd borrow a friend's apartment to shoot in, or work out deals with actors trying to get footage for a demo reel, or stack shoots on top of each other so they could reuse the same sets and crews for multiple videos.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  I remember, mostly in the early days, you're just getting stuff shoved at you.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Norrie Nibbin again. He says that it wasn't exactly a glamorous life in the beginning.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  We had a stage, and in order to shoot on the stage, we had to shoot like four in one day, literally not sleeping and trying to shoot in 24 hours. It was just stupid. And why? Because we had a soundstage.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  But despite the slog of it all, Norrie was really grateful for an opportunity like this. Learning how to shoot a film is incredibly expensive, and Pioneer was basically subsidizing the whole process. Norrie directed a ton of videos for Pioneer, and he was always experimenting with technique. His videos always had different types of color grading, or frame rates, or transitions. He took advantage of those three minutes of LaserDisc space to create something interesting.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  We shot on black and white, on reversal film stocks. We would load the film backwards. We baked the film. We pushed exposures. We did everything you could imagine experimental-wise, just to push it, just to see what we could do to try to create different looks and different styles. And really pushed the science of film, just to go for it.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke video golden age. Stay with us.

• 18:53Roman Mars?

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• 19:38Roman Mars?

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• 21:14Speaker 01

  By the early 1990s, Pioneer's marketing exec Neil Altnew says that the company was doing exactly what they had hoped. They were selling a ton of these karaoke LaserDiscs, and they were making a lot of money.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Let me tell you, when I started back in 1988, we had zero volume coming in. Two years later, we were in the millions. They just couldn't wait for that next LaserDisc to come in. They didn't care what was on it. They just needed to have the next one. So, I would, I would get 5,000 discs, an initial order. They were gone. They were already sold before I even got them. It was like watching a serial on HBO, like, you know, Game of Thrones, and you can't wait till the next episode comes. It was the same thing with the LaserDisc.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  But Neil says that he actually doesn't think the karaoke videos were part of the success of LaserDiscs. If anything, the videos were kind of an afterthought. His take is that LaserDiscs were flying off the shelves because they were just a good product. Like, for one, Pioneer was able to license an incredible library of music. Their discs had tracks for current popular songs, old standards, classics, something for everyone.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  I got disc one, the first one that was ever made. And on side A, this is, they had a really good cross-section of music. On side A was Rock Around the Clock, Great Balls of Fire, Long Tall Sally, Can't Keep a Fallin' in Love With You, Michelle, Eight Days a Week. These are all Beatles songs that they gave us.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Also, Neil and his division at Pioneer were doing exactly what they were supposed to, marketing this product out in the field. He says that they were going out into the trenches to convince bars around New York City to adopt their karaoke system.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  And we said to them, look, we got this thing. The customers will be entertaining customers. So they'll be buying drinks, they'll be doing everything. It'll be good for your business. And what we're going to do is we'll give you the equipment, we'll give you the software, we'll teach you how to use it. The only thing we ask is if you're successful, we're allowed to bring other people in to show the success that we're having with the karaoke.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Word spread, karaoke spread.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  And it got to the point where karaoke was being done seven nights a week in Manhattan.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Karaoke was so popular, it was essentially keeping LaserDisc technology afloat in the 90s. It was also generating a ton of work for the production companies. Pioneer printed at least 80 LaserDisc volumes in the original English-language series alone, each one with 28-track discs. This meant that literally thousands of original karaoke videos needed to be produced alongside those tracks.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  You know, it had reached a peak and there was a lot of money and there was a lot of stuff going into the production. Norrie and I flew to Paris for one of them. It was crazy, you know, for a karaoke video, but it was beautiful, you know?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Culture writer Brian Raftery refuses to call himself a karaoke expert, but he does have a shed crammed full of these discs at his house and has logged an ungodly amount of hours watching these videos.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Oh my God, it's probably, probably one of those things where if I got to heaven or an afterlife and they gave you like a rundown of what you did, I think that would be like the one regret where I'm like, I spent how many hours? I mean, I guess it's in the hundreds of hours range.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And it was during these hundreds of hours that he started noticing some bizarre subgenres across the Pioneer karaoke oeuvre.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  There were, of course, the things you might expect from your 80s music video. Women dancing in fluorescent unitards and brooding men on motorcycles. But Brian also picked up on the fact that a lot of these videos were definitely filmed at the tail end of the Reagan administration.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  There's so many 80s yuppie karaoke videos where it's like a guy in a convertible and he's driving to like the Bluff to go to his house on Malibu and he's got blondes in his car. It's just like this weird 80s idea of excess and success.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  I call them serial killers.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Norrie Niven again.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  I thought that all the love songs, the male actors they hired looked like they wanted to kill everyone. And when they look, when they looked like they were in love, it just looked like they wanted to kill everyone.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  There was also the genre of videos that Brian describes as "the first three minutes of a porno." Nothing explicit, just the exposition.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  The whole era of like these couples that were kind of either together or wandering around the city, they're either like grand, sweeping, pastoral nature scenes where they're both on horses together on the beach, or they're like walking through and like wearing incredibly boxy suits, both the man and the woman, like very, very boxy late 80s power suits. And they're not pornographic or skin flicky, but they're definitely like, this is the beginning of their romantic night. Looking back now, I've never thought about this, but like, people talk about boomers a lot now. If you want to know about like the boomer life in the 80s, like I think these karaoke videos, it's like a lot of middle-aged guys in convertibles, a lot of couples wearing boxy suits, walking around forever. It's like, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting look at what boomers did before

• 26:13Speaker 02

  they found Facebook, I guess. It's like, they loved, they lived, they rode horseback, they, you know, had satin sheets, they, they had very big lives. And this is why they're so angry now. I get it.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  In Brian's opinion, the very best karaoke videos were the ones that were absolutely uncategorizable. The ones with storylines that were so nuts, or so irrelevant to the song itself, that you couldn't help but turn your head towards the screen.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  There were some stupid things that were done.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Neil Altman clearly does not share this opinion. Despite Pioneer not really intervening much on creative, Neil says that of course these videos had to at least be reviewed. And for the most part, he wasn't super impressed.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  I gotta be honest with you. These production companies, they made these videos and they really didn't look at the music that well, because a lot of these videos really didn't fit the music.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  One video for the Cheers theme song, which is a television show about a group of regulars at a bar, had a storyline where a man gets thrown into a jail cell full of scary-looking inmates. But instead of getting the crap kicked out of him, everyone breaks into spontaneous dance.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  There was one where they had the two Barbie dolls they were showing. And it was a love song and they had the, somebody was holding them in their hand and they had the Barbie dolls kissing each other.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  There's one where it's just like a woman feeding a goose seductively or something like that and we're just like, what is this gem?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  In one surreal video for the song "Israelites" by Desmond Decker, a man in shirtless overalls uses a pickaxe to turn a lump of salt into bread, while small children attempt to hoist him into the air with a play parachute. Which is so David Lynchian, I half expected Laura Dern to show up.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  The conversation between the song and the video, I guess you could say, were not always in the same room, tune, or key, but they didn't always make sense to the songs they were going along with, but they were amazing to watch.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  While several of these music videos were insane or cheesy or just aged poorly, like, don't get me started on the video for David Bowie's "China Girl", a lot were actually made well. Many were shot on film stock, well-lit, and you could tell that the people who made them took this as an opportunity to practice a craft. And because Pioneer hired production companies from all over the country, lots of different types of people had the opportunity to try this work on for size. There were camera people, production designers, grips, makeup artists, actors. And some of them eventually went on to do big things in entertainment.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  I think one of the Dixie Chicks wound up in a video, apparently. You know, Dylan McDermott may have been in one, if I remember correctly.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Not Dermott.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Was it Dermot Roney or Dylan McDermott? Oh, my God. I mean, Dermot Roney may have too. I mean, Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman may have done these. I don't know.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  One producer on a ton of karaoke videos named Paris Barkley was eventually elected as president of the Directors Guild of America. And Nori Niven, who you've been hearing from, has been a successful commercial director for around 30 years now. Brian Raftery also spotted a pretty prominent name listed on the credits on a couple of these videos.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Jay Roach, who directed Austin Powers and many other big movies, his name is on one or two of these things, maybe more than that. I directed two videos. One was based on the Barbra Streisand song.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  I am a woman in love and the other one was based on my funny Valentine.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  This is Jay Roach. As Brian mentioned, he directed the Austin Powers films, also The Roses, as well as Meet the Parents. It's kind of funny because he would actually go from directing a Barbra Streisand karaoke video to later directing Barbra Streisand herself.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  You know, I worked with her on Meet the Parkers later and I, if I had remembered, I would have embarrassed myself and told her that I did that video.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  He was still a grad student at the time when he was given the chance to make a couple of these videos. And apparently, these karaoke videos are some of the very first short films he ever directed.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  I'm sure those were my first paid gigs directing anything, for sure. So it might have been kind of steps across that threshold because I really never considered myself a director until I just started doing it.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  He says that he had always seen himself as more of a cinematographer, the technical person who hid behind the camera. But because the stakes and the budget of these music videos were so low, he was kind of forced to give directing actors a try.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Directing actors as a young person, as a new person, is probably the most intimidating thing. I knew about camera, I knew about sound and editing and everything else, but I hadn't really worked with actors that much. So it also gave me a chance to just try that.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Can we say that if it weren't for karaoke videos, we wouldn't have the Austin Powers films? Of course. Would it be true? Probably not. Jay Roach is a talented guy who would have figured out how to direct either way. But talking to him, he seems to have the same gratitude for these videos as everyone else I spoke with for this story. Every opportunity to make something is a chance to learn, and he's carried a little bit of those early karaoke lessons with him throughout his career.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  You have to develop a little bit of tolerance for misery when you make movies. I mean, it's obviously a lucky thing to get to do, but there's never enough budget, there's never enough time. You're always trying to do something, you know, again, that makes you your research and.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And exceed your own capabilities. So it was an accidental film school in a way. It was an accidental opportunity that turned out to be, you know, good for everybody involved.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  But the karaoke video golden age couldn't last forever. And ironically, a big reason why it was doomed was the very same reason why it caught on, the music.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  I say this transition really started to happen in 1994, where you could start seeing the karaoke business going down.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  When the Laser Karaoke division started back in 1988, Pioneer was able to license a ton of popular music, but they only licensed those songs for around seven years. Maybe it was because karaoke was so new and unknown to music publishers, but it was a lot easier to secure the rights at those early stages. By the time those licenses expired, publishers either didn't want to renew them or charged way more money to use those tracks.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  We had like, I'm looking at disc three. It says 28 songs on it. So they had to come out with a disc where they had to take maybe five songs off the disc because they weren't licensed anymore.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  But the final nail in the coffin for Pioneer Laser Karaoke ended up being an emerging media format called CD plus graphics or CDG. CDG was basically a regular audio CD that was capable of displaying very simple graphics on a screen. They weren't advanced enough to show something like a full on movie, but they were capable of displaying lyrics synced to a song. They were also a fraction of the price of LaserDisc. Video production got hit immediately.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Oh, it was a train, it was a train wreck.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Norrie Niven and Saad Nesheli both had a view from inside the train as it was crashing.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  I remember we, I was in a loft downtown and the guy came in from LA. And, oh gosh, and he was like, um, he said, we're going to cut the budgets in half and we'd like for you to start using stock footage. How much stock footage can you cram into these things? And I was like, oh my gosh, red flags everywhere.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  It just kind of got to that point where we were shooting scenic stuff and it just wasn't as fun. There wasn't as much budget anymore.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  And I was like, I'm out. Nothing looked good at that point. So we politely resigned the job.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Eventually, they became the worst kind of karaoke video. Boring. Just stock footage of people walking in a park, by the ocean, on the street. The kinds of videos that I remember watching as a kid. Pioneer released their last English-language karaoke LaserDisc in 1999, and announced the end of all LaserDisc products in 2009.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  You know, flame went out. But it was a fun ride. It really was a fun ride.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Neil Altman stayed with the company until 2008, and he thinks that had Pioneer come out with their karaoke products on CDG format from the beginning, karaoke would have probably been just as popular.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  When I was singing, or when most people sing, they don't even look at the videos. You know, they're looking at the words because they want to get the right words, because nobody cared about the videos.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  That could be true. And had Pioneer not commissioned their karaoke videos, they would have saved millions of dollars. But in making these LaserDiscs, they provided a lot of people with something that seems increasingly rare these days: the opportunity to make something cool.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  I think if they were inventing karaoke in these days, they'd never even think to put a video there because that wouldn't be the motivation. The motivation would be how to do it the most profitably, rather than creating something more interesting.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Nikki Smedley again. She was the producer that worked on these videos in London, and, in case you forgot, was also a [bleep] Teletubby. Nikki still works in the arts. She practically has her whole life. And she says that it was a blessing to receive even a little bit of money to support herself when she was younger.

• 35:34Speaker 06

  When you asked me about whether or not I questioned it, I just went, "No."

• 35:40Speaker 06

  "No, that's great. It's a creative thing. It's working with my pals. It's doing what I love. It's making things out of nothing to music." Tick. Yeah, absolutely. Every single bit of paid work that I got in those days was, yeah, that was manna from heaven, completely and utterly. Actually, I have got a question, which is why are you interested, I suppose?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I got asked this question a lot as I was sending emails to the legends of karaoke past. And yes, the idea of talking about weird-ass karaoke music videos was the initial draw. But really, I think it's probably because I wish I could have been there. I originally moved to Los Angeles to work in production. And had Pioneers still been commissioning these videos, I 1,000% would have done this.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Making even the worst short films is so hard and so expensive and so exhausting. And I loved it so much. I'm kind of in awe that at one point, a whole artistic industry existed where people got paid and people got to take chances. And it was all because an electronics company wanted to sell some LaserDiscs.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Well, as you know very well, it was a relatively short period of time that they were prepared to pay out for these videos to happen. And just a little breaking wave, we managed to surf.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Karaoke, as a form of entertainment, of course, made it out of this period just fine. It's been surfing the wave of technology from the very first machine to 8-tracks, to LaserDisc, to CDG, to being available on every single phone because of YouTube. Singing at the top of our lungs in a dark room with our best friends is a pastime that will never go out of style. But for a very brief, spectacular moment, karaoke also created an opportunity for a lot of people to explore something they loved and make something that they cared about, even if no one was watching.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Ninety-nine percent invisible was produced this week by me, Vivian Le, and edited by our senior editor, Delaney Hall. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real, George Langford, and Jamila Sandoto. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks this week to Hardy Haberman and Jackson Roach. Brian Raftery has a new book out now about, of all things, Hannibal Lecter. It's called Hannibal Lecter: A Life. Also, if at any point during this episode you found yourself wondering, "I wonder what it's like to play a Teletubby?" Well, you're in luck. Nikki Smedley also has a book. It's called Over the Hills and Far Away: My Life as a Teletubby. It is a delightful read, so you should check it out. Kathy Too is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest

• 38:40Speaker 01

  of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasham Adan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and the boss man, Roman Mars. The Ninety-nine percent invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all of the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of Ninety-nine P.I. at ninety-ninepi.org.

• 39:29Speaker 07

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app. A participation at McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper, 7-Up Inc.