Karaoke Videos

Before YouTube, before streaming, before anyone thought too hard about what to put on a screen while a drunk person sang “Benny and the Jets,” a small army of scrappy filmmakers was quietly getting paid to make weird little movies. Nobody was really watching them. Nobody was asking for them. And yet, for about a decade, they existed: thousands of original short films produced specifically for Pioneer LaserKaraoke discs, full of actors, storylines, actual film stock, and a creative freedom that almost no one else in Hollywood was offering.

The story starts in 1988, when Neil Altneu, a sales and marketing executive who had spent years introducing new consumer electronics to the American market, answered a job ad in the New York Times. Pioneer, the Japanese electronics giant, was looking for someone to head up a new American division. The product was karaoke, which was still virtually unknown in the West despite being ubiquitous in Japan, where Pioneer had already revolutionized the format by releasing the first LaserDisc karaoke player.

LaserDisc was the format that lost the home video wars. Picture a DVD the size of a vinyl record. VHS and Betamax crushed it for movie watching, but karaoke turned out to be LaserDisc’s unlikely salvation. Unlike tape, a LaserDisc could jump directly to individual tracks the way a jukebox cycles through songs. For karaoke, this was a killer feature. Pioneer recognized the opportunity and went all in.

When Pioneer began producing discs for the American market, they carried over a convention from Japan: each track came paired with a music video. The reasoning was partly practical (LaserDisc had excellent picture quality, so why waste it?) and partly commercial (the videos helped sell the discs). But the American market required American content. ” I mean, you couldn’t have a song like ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ with a Japanese video on it, it didn’t work,” explains Altneu. Pioneer needed original footage, which meant hiring production companies, which meant giving a lot of young, hungry filmmakers a paying gig.

The budgets were modest, to put it generously. A typical MTV music video in the late 80s and early 90s cost between $50,000 and $60,000. Pioneer’s karaoke videos came in at $3,600 to $10,000, and that had to cover everything: locations, camera rentals, film stock, a crew, actors, and whatever was left for the director. The creative rules were minimal: no existing footage of the original artists, no one visibly singing along to the track, nothing too violent or sexual, and ideally some kind of narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

Everything else was fair game.

Norry Niven was in college in Dallas when someone at a Panavision panel asked if he wanted to shoot some of these videos. He said yes immediately. He shot on black and white film, on reversal stocks, loading film backwards, baking it, pushing it to extremes just to see what different looks he could create. Pioneer was essentially subsidizing his film production education. “It’s about as close to an outside-of-Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get,” says culture writer Brian Raftery, who has spent an embarrassing number of hours watching these videos and wrote a book about karaoke called Don’t Stop Believin’ How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life.

Raftery first encountered the videos at a New York dive called Village Karaoke in the late 1990s, and he couldn’t stop thinking about them. They were genuinely strange. One video for “Benny and the Jets” featured a mother luring children toward a plate of cookies. A video for the Cheers theme, a song literally about a neighborhood bar, involved a man thrown into a jail cell where everyone breaks into spontaneous dance. A surreal clip for Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” showed a shirtless man in overalls turning a lump of salt into bread while children tried to lift him with a play parachute.

“At times the conversation between the song and the video were not always in the same room, tune, or key,” Raftery says. “But they were amazing to watch.”

Not everyone was charmed. Neil Altneu, who oversaw the American operation, was often unimpressed. “A lot of these videos really didn’t fit the music,” he says. And Sadhna Sheli, a producer at LDCA (Pioneer’s LaserDisc Corporation of America) who served as the liaison between Pioneer and the production companies, admits that nobody at the top was watching very closely. “I don’t think anyone was probably watching them except for us,” she says. Which meant the people making them had almost complete artistic freedom.

That freedom turned out to matter. Paris Barclay, who produced a pile of karaoke videos during this era, later became president of the Directors Guild of America. Jay Roach, who went on to direct the Austin Powers films and Meet the Parents, directed two of these videos as a grad student. They were, he says, his first paid directing gigs, and they forced him to do the thing he found most intimidating: work with actors. “I knew about camera, I knew about sound and editing and everything else, but I hadn’t really worked with actors that much,” he says. “It was an accidental film school.”

It couldn’t last. By the mid-1990s, the music licenses that Pioneer had secured in the late 1980s began to expire, and publishers either refused to renew them or demanded far more money. Then came CD+Graphics, or CDG: a cheap audio CD format capable of displaying synced lyrics on screen. No video, no production cost, a fraction of the price of a LaserDisc. The karaoke market shifted almost overnight.

Budgets were slashed. Directors were asked to start using stock footage. The weird, ambitious little films gave way to exactly the kind of videos that had always been the alternative: people walking on beaches, couples in sailboats, rollerskaters in parks. The golden age ended not with a bang but with generic B-roll. Pioneer released its last English-language LaserKaraoke disc in 1999.

Neil Altneu, who stayed with Pioneer until 2008, suspects that the videos were never really the point. Singers, he notes, are mostly looking at the lyrics anyway. “Nobody cared about the videos,” he says. Maybe he’s right. But in the process of making something nobody asked for, an electronics company accidentally created one of the stranger and more democratic creative opportunities in recent entertainment history: a few thousand chances for a few dozen people to figure out how to make something.

Karaoke survived all of it. It has ridden every new format from 8-track to LaserDisc to CDG to YouTube, and it shows no signs of stopping. But the window when it also quietly funded a generation of filmmakers was brief, specific, and gone.

“Just a little breaking wave we managed to surf,” Nikky Smedley says.