This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
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.
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
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.
This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall | Sciencx (2025-01-23T10:00:13+00:00) Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/01/23/revisit-pop-up-video-the-vh1-series-that-reinvented-music-videos-pop-culture/
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