Video history

[Karen Newcombe <kln@staralliance.com>]

Someone the other day was asking about why videos were being made before MTV
was around and whether they were professionally done as they often seem to
look "home made."

If I remember correctly, I started seeing music videos on television shows
about the time videotape recorders, videotape players, and cable were
becoming fairly accessible. This would be late 70's.  Few people had cable,
and a major selling point seemed to be that since you were paying for
television you'd never have to watch a commercial again!  Music videos were
used on music shows in lieu of live appearances; it seems like I saw them on
variety shows as well and they were often clips from live concerts.  The
music video as we think of it grew over time from embarrasingly bad to the
MTV stage.  REally, no-one had the vaguest idea what to do with the thing
for a long time.  Lots of early videos either have bands just standing there
playing their instruments, or galloping on horseback along suspiciously
Californian looking beaches rescuing heavily made up underdressed female
humans from dubious fish-headed creatures clad in kelp. 

I remember everyone thinking "Who in hell is going to watch a 24-hour-daily
program of just rock music?" (Sort of like everyone thinking who in hell
would go into the sweltering, mosquito-infested swamps outside
Orlando-home-of-lap-dancing to go to a Disney park?)  Since there were only
a couple hundred music videos at the time, they showed the same ones over
and over again, and they nearly all looked slapped together in haste.

Music video took a while to get going, for the equipment to improve, for
people to figure out the possibilities of the medium, for the quality of
tape to get better, etc. Kate's videos looked darned sophisticated compared
to 90% of what was being done.

Of course these are all hazy memories. Anyone else old enough to remember
the advent of music videos?  (Just kidding heh heh)

Karen  kln@staralliance.com