Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Vivian Le in this week for Roman Mars. 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.
Chapter 2: What personal experiences shaped the host's view on karaoke?
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. 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.
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 look really great.
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.
Like the Benny and the Jets video, you can 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.
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.
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.
Some of these karaoke videos were clearly bananas, but they were not lacking in ambition. Actors were hired, locations were scouted, lighting was designed, and a lot of them were shot on actual film stock. Ryan wanted to know who had made these and why go through all the effort.
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Chapter 3: How did Brian Raftery's karaoke experiences differ from the host's?
It was huge in Asia, though, particularly in Japan, where Pioneer was headquartered. The word karaoke itself is Japanese, meaning empty orchestra.
If 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.
And actually, a big reason why karaoke was already so popular in Japan was because of Pioneer's karaoke technology.
Yeah!
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.
And I've got one on my hand right now. It's a, this looks like an LP record. It's silver and it has information on both sides. and there's 28 videos on each disc.
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.
The 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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What was the unique production approach of karaoke videos in the 90s?
They wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end. They really wanted you to stick to the storyline of the song.
By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story.
Brian Raftery again.
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.
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.
You know, if it was a song, if it was Thriller, they did not want you to do, like, the Thriller dance. They wanted you to come up with something original.
There were, of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show.
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.
Pioneer also didn't want anything too violent or too salacious.
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Chapter 5: Who were the key figures behind the creation of karaoke videos?
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.
But despite the slog of it all, Nori 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. Nori 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.
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 it really pushed the science of film just to go for it.
After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke video golden age. Stay with us. 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 laser discs, and they were making a lot of money.
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 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.
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.
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