Of Manga and '80s music videos

If you are of a "certain age" you remember the beginnings of MTV. Lots of kewl videos. Some of them made with animation techniques. Not much else.

One of the more memorable videos of that period was "Take On Me" by one-hit-wonders A-Ha. Lousy freaking song. Babe-o-licious male lead singer. Lots of electronics. Anyway: the video used rotoscoping to render part of the performance as if it was a sketchy manga. People didn't entirely know what they were looking at: they assumed it was a Western-style comic book. But this was perhaps the first exposure a lot of people had to manga aesthetics.

Anyway, this comes to mind because someone did a hilarious parody version of the video. Here, take a look at it:



Speed Racer aka Mach Go Go Go! immediately comes to mind, as does the kind of layouts you see in manga. The fact that the rotoscoping was done in black and white kind of adds to the manga feel of the whole thing. I really do think this was the first time that someone did anything manga tinged in music video. I'm prolly full of beans here but I thought it was first.

Don't mind me...just a middle aged animation nerd getting nostalgic.

Here, here's another flashback, from Richard X Heyman. Sayonara.