Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture

In the eight­ies, peo­ple lament­ed the atten­tion-span-short­en­ing “MTV-iza­tion” of visu­al cul­ture. By the mid-nineties, net­works were try­ing to fig­ure out how to get view­ers to sit through music videos at all. A solu­tion arrived in the form of Pop-Up Video, a pro­gram pitched by cre­ators Woody Thomp­son and Tad Low to VH1 when that much-less-cool MTV clone found itself strug­gling to stay car­ried by cable providers. It had an appeal­ing­ly low-bud­get con­cept: take exist­ing music videos, and spice them up with text bub­bles con­tain­ing facts about the artists, behind-the-scenes anec­dotes, and amus­ing (if semi-rel­e­vant) triv­ia.

“We got a lot of resis­tance from VH1. They owned Block­buster Video at the time, so they knew no one rent­ed for­eign films because no one want­ed to read the TV.” So recalls Low in a Bill­board inter­view about the his­to­ry of the show, which orig­i­nal­ly ran from 1996 to 2002 (with a brief revival in 2011 and 2012). Like many cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na beloved of mil­len­ni­als, Pop-Up Video has received the oral-his­to­ry treat­ment more than once: Uproxx also did one a cou­ple years ear­li­er. These arti­cles are enter­tain­ing in the same way as Pop-Up Video itself, open­ing up the doors of the fac­to­ry and offer­ing a glimpse of how pop-cul­tur­al sausage gets made.

Launched well before the age of Wikipedia, Pop-Up Video required inten­sive research. That meant not just inter­net search­es, but phone calls to direc­tors, pro­duc­tion design­ers, hair­styl­ists, car­pen­ters, cater­ers, and any­one else who might have worked on a par­tic­u­lar music video (if not the musi­cians, few of whom knew how their videos were made, and even few­er of whom were will­ing to dish dirt on them­selves). These often com­pli­cat­ed, rushed, and oth­er­wise trou­bled pro­duc­tions tend­ed to pro­duce mem­o­rable sto­ries, which par­tic­i­pants turned out to be hap­py to tell years lat­er — not that the net­work or the artists’ man­age­ment were always hap­py with the results.

Also like many cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na beloved of mil­len­ni­als, the show was sat­u­rat­ed with the famous­ly irrev­er­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty of Gen­er­a­tion X. Tasked with deliv­er­ing fun facts, its writ­ers did­n’t hes­i­tate to knock celebri­ties off their pedestals while they were at it, and with a sense of humor that came to be rec­og­nized as decep­tive­ly intel­li­gent. (Head writer Alan Cross has spo­ken of being inspired by Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Low by a favorite writer who made “exten­sive use of foot­notes,” which brings anoth­er three-ini­tial name to mind.) You can watch over 100 “popped” music videos on this Youtube playlist, with more at the Inter­net Archive. Alas, many have nev­er come avail­able online, but then, Pop-Up Video did make a virtue of ephemer­al­i­ty.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today

The 50 Great­est Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

Revis­it Episodes of Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, MTV’s 90s Show­case of Fun­ny, Irrev­er­ent & Bizarre Ani­ma­tion

How Rick Astley’s “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bas­tion of Inter­net Cul­ture: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.