Memory Lane: "Take on Me"

I absolutely adored A-ha's "Take on Me" MTV video when I was younger.

It is still fairly classic--for one, it's a great song and led me to discover that A-ha is still around--no longer technically together but the band lasted a surprisingly long time and the musicians are still doing musical stuff.

Two, the video has an actual story with an actual arc.

Three, the story--while a product of its time period (Tron meets the ubiquitous cafe of Back to the Future and Terminator plus the undying classical milieu of graphic novels)--is entirely comprehensible without inside knowledge.

In comparison, I also recently watched the  unchanging Cyndi Lauper in "Time after Time."

Fantastic song. Amazing artiste. But the video--which is a story--seems entirely dependent on character context, the kind of video about which  my friends (back in the day) would have said, "Oh, you've got to watch it over and over to get all the clues about their relationship!" (Keep in mind: these videos were very popular.)

Kind of like watching Meatloaf's videos (and I'm a HUGE Meatloaf fan) where I feel like I need cliff-notes. (Where exactly are they? Is this the same couple from "Dashboard Light"? When did they meet?)

In the 1980s world of story videos, A-ha's video still stands out.

I should mention: at least both these videos tell stories--they're not some artistic rendering of someone's soul (Oh, why don't you get me?), which renderings are supposedly valuable simply because of the artists' reputations. 

1980s artists worked really hard to be entertaining.