1982

1982 is when somebody worked out that a video could sell records on its own, and the money followed almost immediately.

The evidence is Duran Duran. Late in 1982 the band went to Sri Lanka and Antigua with the director Russell Mulcahy and came back with a set of videos that looked like nothing else on television. "Rio" has a yacht. "Hungry Like The Wolf" has a jungle chase shot on location. They were expensive, they looked like films rather than promos, and they made the band enormous in America.

That was the demonstration the industry needed. A video was no longer a cost to be minimised. It was a marketing weapon, and marketing weapons get budgets.

The look changes

You can see the shift in the basic craft. Videos start being shot on film rather than videotape, which gives them depth and grain instead of the flat brightness of a television studio. Directors start using proper lighting rather than simply illuminating the band. Locations appear. Editing gets faster and more confident.

Some of this is Mulcahy specifically, who had an eye for a saturated, sunlit, faintly ridiculous glamour that defined a great deal of what the early 80s looked like. But it spread quickly, because everybody could see what it was doing for the records.

What was being built quietly

In November 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller. Nothing about the album's first months suggested what was coming. The videos that would turn it into the biggest record ever made were still ahead, and MTV had a problem it had not yet been forced to confront: the channel was playing very few Black artists, a fact that would come to a head the following year.

What it means for the puzzle

1982 videos are much friendlier to the static reveal than 1980 or 1981. There are locations, there is colour, there are compositions designed to be striking. Sunlight and saturated colour push through noise far better than a dim studio does, so if a bright, warm image starts resolving early, you are probably somewhere in this stretch of the decade.

The 1982 videos in WTV

These 23 videos from 1982 appear in the game.

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