Vivian Leigh

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But it couldn't be exactly the same.

Those videos were shot in Japan.

For Japanese songs.

For a Japanese audience.

Which is how people like Nori Niven got involved.

In the late 1980s, Norrie 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.