Vivian Leigh

Their discs had tracks for current popular songs, old standards, classics, something for everyone.

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.

Word spread.

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 tracks disc.

This meant that literally thousands of original karaoke videos needed to be produced alongside those tracks.

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.

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

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.

Nori Niven again.

There was also the genre of videos that Brian describes as the first three minutes of a porno.

Nothing explicit, just the exposition.

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.

Neil Altnew 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.

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.