Karaoke Videos

VIVIAN LE: 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. Every time I hear the song Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain, I can 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. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: 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. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: Like the Bennie 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 Bennie and the Jets?” Like, no Bennie, no Jets…

VIVIAN LE: It wasn’t like these videos were unrelated stock footage just thrown over music. These are all originally produced short films, equipped with their own storylines, characters, and tangential interpretations of the song’s lyrics. And there are literally thousands of videos like this. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: 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 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 and Stevie Wonder duet. But it makes no sense that it’s a dog park. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: I was just kind of like, “This is weird that we’re just here as a goof and someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Hall & Oates song that we’re all drunkenly singing in a tiny room.”

VIVIAN LE: As it turns out, these weirdo karaoke videos were kind of their own micro movement of filmmaking. It only lasted a handful of years and is only remembered by a handful people, but it gave a generation of aspiring filmmakers something that barely exists anymore: a paying gig where they could just mess around and figure out how to make stuff. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: It’s about as close to an outside of Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get. 

VIVIAN LE: Some videos were good, some were bad, and several were so bad that they were awesome. And I had to know more about where they came from. 

The story of these videos actually originated about a decade before Brian discovered them at Village Karaoke. Back in the 1980s, the world of consumer electronics was exploding. Personal computers, the Walkman, camcorders, fax machines, the Game Boy… It was like a shiny new toy was coming out on a monthly basis. And Neil Altneu wanted in. 

NEIL ALTNEU: I basically was a sales and marketing exec, and I introduced a lot of products to the United States. 

VIVIAN LE: One day, in 1988, Neil was flipping through the New York Times, and he saw a job ad that intrigued him. 

NEIL ALTNEU: And they were looking for somebody for some sort of a startup in the East Coast. 

VIVIAN LE: The company that put out that ad was Pioneer, the Japanese electronics corporation. They were looking for someone to head up a brand new division, specifically in America. Neil applied. And when he got an interview, his wife drove down with him to the Pioneer offices in Manhattan. 

NEIL ALTNEU: Well, you know, maybe two hours passed. I came down and I said, “This is a really interesting product.” And she said, “What is it?” And I said, “It’s this thing called karaoke.” She said, “What is karaoke? What is that?”

VIVIAN LE: Karaoke had been around for over a decade at this point. But back in the 1980s, it was still pretty unknown in the West. It was huge in Asia though, particularly in Japan where Pioneer was headquartered. The word “karaoke” itself is Japanese, meaning “empty orchestra.”

NEIL ALTNEU: 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. 

VIVIAN LE: And actually, a big reason why karaoke was already so popular in Japan was because of Pioneer’s karaoke technology. 

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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: And I’ve got one in my hand right now. This looks like an LP record. It’s silver, and it has information on both sides. Okay, and there’s 28 videos on each disc. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: And videotape won the war. LaserDisc only was able to capture maybe 1% of the market. But the video market is so huge. 1% in 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% on the market all alone.”

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: Pioneer said, “You know what? For a karaoke application, this is perfect.”

VIVIAN LE: Essentially, all you need for karaoke are two things, a backing track and the lyrics to the song displayed on the screen. But when Pioneer manufactured these discs for the Japanese market, they also decided to include one additional element, a karaoke music video that went along with each track. 

NEIL ALTNEU: I think that the original concept of using those videos in Japan was to basically sell LaserDiscs. 

VIVIAN LE: LaserDiscs were known for having really good picture resolution, way better than its competitors, VHS or Betamax. Pioneer in Japan figured it would be a complete waste not to put a nice looking video up on the screen. And Neil says when Pioneer decided to expand to the American market and get laser karaoke into American bars, they copied that same formula. 

NEIL ALTNEU: They had a lot of success in Japan with it that way. And they wanted to replicate their success in the United States. And they felt that “this is the way we did it in Japan, we gotta do it in the United States the same way.”

VIVIAN LE: But it couldn’t be exactly the same. Those videos were shot in Japan, for Japanese songs, for a Japanese audience. 

NEIL ALTNEU: You know, you couldn’t have a song like, you know, I Shot the Sheriff with a Japanese video on it. It didn’t work. You had to have a production company go out there and shoot the videos. 

VIVIAN LE: Which is how people like Norry Niven got involved. 

NORRY NIVEN: I always compared it to that scene in Conan the Barbarian where he has to push that rock in a circle for, like, ten years before he becomes a grown man, you know, when he’s all strong because you shoot a million feet of film and either you fail or you come out of it stronger. 

VIVIAN LE: In the late 1980s, Norry was actually still in college. He had been directing music videos for local artists when the opportunity to work on these karaoke videos fell into his lap. 

NORRY NIVEN: Somehow I wound up on a panel for music videos at Panavision in Dallas. And I’m, like, 20 years old. And one of the guys on the panel said, “Hey, I’ve got these karaoke videos. Do you want to come to shoot some of them?” And I would shoot anything. I mean, I love shooting film. And the idea of shooting music videos sounded really fun. And of course I said yes. 

VIVIAN LE: Pioneer had a division called LaserDisc Corporation of America, also known as LDCA. They contracted production companies and directors from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, and even London. And Norry remembers early on that there was one specific directive for these videos. 

NORRY NIVEN: They wanted stories. So I remember they really wanted a narrative weave. They wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end. They really wanted you to stick to the storyline of the song. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story. 

VIVIAN LE: Brian Raftery again. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: Because at that point, Western audiences, especially after seven or eight years of MTV, knew that every video had to have either a wild collage or a very easy to follow narrative. 

VIVIAN LE: 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 songs. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: You know, if it was Thriller, they did not want you to do the Thriller dance. They want you to come to something original. 

VIVIAN LE: There were, of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: I know they did not want people singing. I think one thing is to have no one singing along to the song, almost not acknowledging that it’s there, because the focus should be on the singer. 

VIVIAN LE: Pioneer also didn’t want anything too violent or too salacious. 

SADHNA SHELI: I just had to keep it clean, so I had to be careful with, you know, nothing was too sexualized or whatever it was. 

VIVIAN LE: Sadhna Sheli was a producer at LDCA. She worked with dozens of directors during her time there and was a liaison between the higher-ups at Pioneer and the production companies actually making the videos. 

SADHNA SHELI: It was a wild time where you kind of had free rein. It was scary in a way, but it was also really a lot of fun. 

VIVIAN LE: Sadhna said that, aside from those family-friendly rules, they almost never got any creative notes from the company. 

SADHNA SHELI: I don’t think anyone was probably watching them except for us. 

VIVIAN LE: Which also meant that the people making these videos had near complete artistic freedom. 

SADHNA SHELI: I don’t even think that making a good karaoke video was the thing. It was just making good art, you know, not necessarily for karaoke. I don’t think any of us had that in mind when we shot it. It was making beautiful art. 

VIVIAN LE: But that beautiful art came with a pretty big limitation. Pioneer was a huge company with capital to throw behind these new karaoke videos, but not, like, that much capital. In the late ’80s and ’90s, the average cost of a music video on MTV could run 50 to 60 thousand dollars. These karaoke videos on the other hand ranged from $3,600 to $10,000 because, well, this wasn’t MTV. That budget had to cover production costs like locations, camera rentals, film stock and development, props, a crew, actors, and whatever payment you can walk away with for yourself. So these videos became a real filmmaking test of what directors could do with a micro-budget, limited resources, and the creative wiggle room to go wild. 

VIVIAN LE: I mean, when the idea first came to you, were you kind of like, “You’re going to pay us to do this thing? Do you really need, like, a high production video?” Like, what were your thoughts when…

NIKKY SMEDLEY: Never even thought that. Just went, “Oh, great, brilliant, yes.” You don’t question it at all. I wasn’t biting the hand that fed. “Yeah, I can do that. And I like the sound of it. Let’s do that.”

VIVIAN LE: This is Nikky Smedley. She produced a handful of karaoke videos for Pioneer in London and has had a long career in entertainment. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: I started out as a dancer and an actress. I ran a cabaret club. I went on to be a Teletubby. And now I do a one-woman show for grownups. And that’s me. 

VIVIAN LE: You did hear that correctly. Nikky was one of the original Teletubbies. She played Laa-Laa, the yellow one. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: I always say to people, “I’m not famous. I just had one very famous outfit.” So yeah, that’s what I did. People won’t recognize me. [LAA-LAA VOICE] But they recognize the voice!

VIVIAN LE: At the time, Nikky had very little to no production experience. Her friend, Neil, was hired to direct some videos and brought her on as a producer and choreographer. I found her name on the credits for Pioneer LaserDisc Volume 307, which I was actually holding in my hand during our Zoom call. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: That one– I think you’ve got Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent.

VIVIAN LE: I do! You recognize it from the back of the– 

VIVIAN LE: Nikky instantly clocked the LaserDisc volume in my hand. It had a song for a video she worked on called Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent.

NIKKY SMEDLEY: That’s the first one that Neil and I did, working together.

VIVIAN LE: If you’ve never heard it, it’s an R&B song by Gwen Guthrie about a woman looking for a man who’s, at the very least, financially stable. “No romance without finance” is the refrain. Nikky and her director, Neil, on the other hand, plotted out a different story for the video. It was about a couple who throw a house party in order to come up with money for rent. It’s definitely a different interpretation of the song’s original meaning, but it works. She broke down the process of how that video was planned. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: I would have a meeting with Neil and give him a general idea and we would talk through the different shots that we thought we needed and, yes, start doing a bit of loose budgeting coming for what we need. And then at the same time, I would be working with the music and drawing, like I have a kind of beat map of the construction of the song. And then we’d meet up with the cameraman and go, “This is what we want.” Maybe have to make or find some props… 

VIVIAN LE: And then voila! [CHUCKLES]

VIVIAN LE: It has the look of any British synth pop video you might see on MTV in the 1980s. High contrast lighting, graphic wipes, glamorous melancholy… If you blinked, you might think you were watching a Kajagoogoo music video. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: And it went down so brilliantly well that they asked us to do more, so we started a little company. 

VIVIAN LE: In order to keep things within budget, producers needed to get creative. They’d borrow a friend’s apartment to shoot in or work out deals with actors trying to get footage for a demo reel or stack shoots on top of each other so they could reuse the same sets and crews for multiple videos. 

NORRY NIVEN: I remember, mostly in the early days, you’re just getting stuff shoved at you. 

VIVIAN LE: Norry Niven again. He says that it wasn’t exactly a glamorous life in the beginning. 

NORRY NIVEN: We had a stage. And in order to shoot on the stage, we had to shoot, like, four in one day. I’m literally not sleeping and trying to shoot in 24 hours. It was just stupid. And why? Because we had a soundstage. 

VIVIAN LE: But despite the slog of it all, Norry 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. Norry 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. 

NORRY NIVEN: 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 really pushed the science of film just to go for it. 

VIVIAN LE: After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke video golden age. Stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

VIVIAN LE: By the early 1990s, Pioneer’s marketing exec, Neil Altneu, says that the company was doing exactly what they had hoped. They were selling a ton of these karaoke LaserDiscs. And they were making a lot of money. 

NEIL ALTNEU: 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 in 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. 

VIVIAN LE: 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… 

NEIL ALTNEU: I got Disc One, the first one that was ever made. And on side A, they had a really good cross section of music. On side A was Rock Around the Clock, Great Balls of Fire, Long Tall Sally, Can’t Help Falling in Love, Michelle, Eight Days a Week… These are all Beatles songs that they gave us. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: And we said to them, “Look, we got this thing. The customers will be entertaining customers. So they’ll be buying drinks. They’ll be doing everything. They’ll be good for your business. And what we’re gonna do is we’ll give you the equipment. We’ll give you the software. We’ll teach you how to use it. The only thing we ask is if you’re successful, we’re allowed to bring other people in to show the success that we’re having with the karaoke.”

VIVIAN LE: Word spread. Karaoke spread. 

NEIL ALTNEU: And it got to the point where karaoke was being done seven nights a week in Manhattan. 

VIVIAN LE: 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 a disc. This meant that literally thousands of original karaoke videos needed to be produced alongside those tracks. 

SADHNA SHELI: It had reached a peak and there was a lot of money and there was a lot of stuff going into the production. Norry and I flew to Paris for one of them. Man, it’s crazy for a karaoke video, but it was beautiful. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: Oh my God. It’s probably one of those things where if I got to heaven or an afterlife and they gave you, like, a rundown of what you did, I think that would be the one regret, where I’m like, “I spent how many hours?” I mean, I guess it’s in the hundreds of hours range. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: There’s so many ’80s yuppie karaoke videos where it’s, like, a guy in a convertible and he’s driving to a bluff to go to his house on Malibu and he’s got blondes in his car. It’s just this weird ’80s idea of excess and success. 

NORRY NIVEN: I call them serial killers. 

VIVIAN LE: Norry Niven again. 

NORRY NIVEN: I thought that all the love songs… The male actors they hired looked like they wanted to kill everyone. When they looked like they were in love, it just looked like they wanted to kill everyone.

VIVIAN LE: There was also the genre of videos that Brian describes as “the first three minutes of a porno.” Nothing explicit, just the exposition.

BRIAN RAFTERY: The whole era of, like, these couples that were kind of either together or wandering around the city. They’re either, like, grand sweeping pastoral nature scenes where they’re both on horses together on the beach, or they’re walking through and wearing incredibly boxy suits–both the man and the woman–very, very boxy late ’80s power suits. And they’re not pornographic or skin flicky, but they’re definitely like, “This is the beginning of their romantic night.” Looking back now– I’ve never thought about this, but people talk about boomers a lot now. If you want to know about the boomer life in the ’80s, I think these karaoke videos… It’s a lot of middle-aged guys and convertibles, a lot of couples wearing boxy suits walking around forever… It’s an interesting look at what boomers did before they found Facebook, I guess. They loved, they lived, they rode horseback, they had satin sheets, they had very big lives, and this is why they’re so angry now. I get it.

VIVIAN LE: 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 ALTNEU: There were some stupid things that were done. 

VIVIAN LE: Neil Altneu 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: I gotta be honest with you, these production companies… They made these videos, and they really didn’t look at the music that well because a lot of these videos really didn’t fit the music.

VIVIAN LE: 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. But instead of getting the crap kicked out of him, everyone breaks into spontaneous dance. 

NEIL ALTNEU: There was one where they had the two Barbie dolls they were showing. And it was a love song, and somebody was holding them in their hand and they have the Barbie dolls kissing each other. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: There’s one where it’s just, like, a woman feeding a goose seductively or something like that. And we’re just like, “What is this gem?”

VIVIAN LE: In one surreal video for the song Israelites by Desmond Dekker, a man in shirtless overalls uses a pickaxe to turn a lump of salt into bread while small children attempt to hoist him into the air with a play parachute, which is so David Lynchian that I half-expected Laura Dern to show up. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: The conversation between the song and the video, I guess you could say, were not always in the same room, tune, or key. They didn’t always make sense to the songs they were going along with, but they were amazing to watch. 

VIVIAN LE: While several of these music videos were insane or cheesy or just aged poorly–don’t get me started on the video for David Bowie’s China Girl–a lot were actually made well. Many were shot on film stock, well lit, and you could tell that the people who made them took this as an opportunity to practice a craft. And because Pioneer hired production companies from all over the country, lots of different types of people had the opportunity to try this work on for size. There were camera people, production designers, grips, makeup artists, actors, and some of them eventually went on to do big things in entertainment. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: I think one of the Dixie Chicks wound up in a video apparently. You know, Dylan McDermott may have been in one, if I remember correctly. 

VIVIAN LE: Not Dermot Mulroney?

BRIAN RAFTERY: I mean, Dermot Mulroney may have, too. I mean, Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman may have done these. I don’t know.

VIVIAN LE: One producer on a ton of karaoke videos, named Paris Barclay, was eventually elected as president of the Directors Guild of America. And Norry Niven, who you’ve been hearing from, has been a successful commercial director for around 30 years now. Brian Raftery also spotted a pretty prominent name listed on the credits on a couple of these videos. 

BRIAN RAFTERY: Jay Roach–who directed Austin Powers and many other big movies–his name is on one or two of these things. Maybe more than that. 

JAY ROACH: I directed two videos. One was based on the Barbra Streisand song, I Am a Woman in Love. And the other one was based on My Funny Valentine. 

VIVIAN LE: This is Jay Roach. As Brian mentioned, he directed the Austin Powers films, also The Roses, as well as Meet the Parents. It’s kind of funny because he would actually go from directing a Barbra Streisand karaoke video to later directing Barbra Streisand herself. 

JAY ROACH: You know, I worked with her on Meet the Fockers later. And if I had remembered, I would have embarrassed myself and told her that I did that video. 

VIVIAN LE: He was still a grad student at the time when he was given the chance to make a couple of these videos. And apparently, these karaoke videos are some of the very first short films he ever directed. 

JAY ROACH: I’m sure those were my first paid gigs directing anything, for sure. So, it might’ve been kind of steps across that threshold because I really never considered myself a director until I just started doing it. 

VIVIAN LE: He says that he had always seen himself as more of a cinematographer, the technical person who hid behind the camera. But because the stakes and the budget of these music videos were so low, he was kind of forced to give directing actors a try. 

JAY ROACH: Directing actors as a young person–as a new person–is probably the most intimidating thing. I knew about camera, I knew about sound and editing and everything else, but I hadn’t really worked with actors that much. So it also gave me a chance to just try that. 

VIVIAN LE: Can we say that if it weren’t for karaoke videos, we wouldn’t have the Austin Powers films? Of course. 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. 

JAY ROACH: You have to develop a little bit of tolerance for misery when you make movies. I mean, it’s obviously a lucky thing to get to do. But there’s never enough budget. There’s never enough time. You’re always trying to do something that may exceed your resources and exceed your own capabilities. So, it was an accidental film school in a way. It was an accidental opportunity that turned out to be good for everybody involved. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: I say this transition really started to happen in 1994, where you could start seeing the karaoke business going down. 

VIVIAN LE: 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. 

NEIL ALTNEU: We had, like… I’m looking at disc three. There’s 28 songs on it. So they had to come out with a disc where they had to take maybe five songs off the disc because they weren’t licensed anymore. 

VIVIAN LE: But the final nail in the coffin for Pioneer Laser Karaoke ended up being an emerging media format called CD+Graphics or CD+G. CD+G 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. 

NORRY NIVEN: Oh, it was a train wreck. 

VIVIAN LE: Norry Niven and Sadhna Sheli both had a view from inside the train as it was crashing. 

NORRY NIVEN: I remember I was in a loft downtown. And the guy came in from LA. And, oh gosh… And he said, “We’re going to cut the budgets in half. And we’d like for you to start using stock footage. How much stock footage can you cram into these things?” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, red flags everywhere.”

SADHNA SHELI: It just kind of got to that point where we were shooting scenic stuff and it just wasn’t as fun. There wasn’t as much budget anymore. 

NORRY NIVEN: And I was like, “I’m out.” Nothing looked good at that point, so we politely resigned the job. 

VIVIAN LE: 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–the kinds of videos that I remember watching as a kid. Pioneer released their last English language karaoke LaserDisc in 1999 and announced the end of all LaserDisc products in 2009. 

SADHNA SHELI: You know, the flame went out. But it was a fun ride. It really was a fun ride. 

VIVIAN LE: Neil Altneu stayed with the company until 2008, and he thinks that had Pioneer come out with their karaoke products on CD+G format from the beginning, karaoke would have probably been just as popular. 

NEIL ALTNEU: When I was singing, or when most people sing, they don’t even look at the videos. You know, they’re looking at the words because they want to get the right words because nobody cared about the videos! 

VIVIAN LE: That could be true. And had Pioneer not commissioned their karaoke videos, they would have saved millions of dollars. But in making these LaserDiscs, they provided a lot of people with something that seems increasingly rare these days: the opportunity to make something cool. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: I think if they were inventing karaoke in these days, they’d never even think to put a video there because that wouldn’t be the motivation. The motivation would be how to do it the most profitably rather than creating something more interesting. 

VIVIAN LE: Nikky Smedley again. She was the producer that worked on these videos in London and, in case you forgot, was also a [BLEEP] Teletubby. Nikky still works in the arts. She practically has her whole life. And she says that it was a blessing to receive even a little bit of money to support herself when she was younger. 

NIKKY SMEDLEY: When you asked me about whether or not I questioned it and I just went, “No! No, that’s great. It’s a creative thing. It’s working with my pals. It’s doing what I love. It’s making things out of nothing to music to music…” Yeah, absolutely. Every single bit of paid work that I got in those days was manna from heaven, completely and utterly. Actually, I have got a question, which is why are you interested, I suppose. 

VIVIAN LE: I got asked this question a lot as I was sending emails to the legends of karaoke past. And yes, the idea of talking about weird-ass karaoke music videos was the initial draw. But really, I think it’s probably because I wish I could have been there. I originally moved to Los Angeles to work in production. And had Pioneer still been commissioning these videos, I 1,000% would have done this. 

Making even the worst short films is so hard and so expensive and so exhausting. And I loved it so much. I’m kind of in awe that, at one point, a whole artistic industry existed where people got paid and people got to take chances and it was all because an electronics company wanted to sell some LaserDiscs.

NIKKY SMEDLEY: Well, as you know very well, it was a relatively short period of time that they were prepared to pay out for these videos to happen and just a little breaking wave we managed to surf.

VIVIAN LE: Karaoke, as a form of entertainment, of course, made it out of this period just fine. It’s been surfing the wave of technology from the very first machine to eight tracks to LaserDisc to CD+G to being available on every single phone because of YouTube. Singing at the top of our lungs in a dark room with our best friends is a pastime that will never go out of style. But for a very brief, spectacular moment, Karaoke also created an opportunity for a lot of people to explore something they loved and make something that they cared about, even if no one was watching. 

99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Vivian Le, and edited by our senior editor Delaney Hall. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real, George Langford, and Jamilah Sandoto. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.

Special thanks this week to Hardy Haberman and Jackson Roach.

Brian Raftery has a new book out now about, of all things, Hannibal Lecter. It’s called Hannibal Lecter: A Life. Also if at any point you found yourself wondering, “I wonder what it’s like playing a Teletubby,” well then you’re in luck. Nikky Smedley also has a book, it’s called Over the Hills and Far Away: My Life as a Teletubby. It is a delightful read so you should check it out.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and the boss man, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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