Vivian Leigh

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.