Vivian Leigh

Ryan wanted to know who had made these and why go through all the effort.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A few years before Neil joined the company, Pioneer completely revolutionized the karaoke game by releasing the first ever karaoke Laserdisc player.