1985

1985 is the year the form starts showing off, and the year pop music briefly convinced itself it could fix the world.

Live Aid

On 13 July, Wembley and Philadelphia ran simultaneous concerts broadcast to most of the planet. Whatever you think about what it achieved, it settled something about the scale pop music now operated at, and it made a small number of performances permanently famous. "Do They Know It's Christmas" the previous December and "We Are The World" in March had already established the charity single as a genre with its own conventions, most of them involving a great many famous people in a recording studio at once.

Videos that could not be filmed

The more interesting development is technical. Two videos from 1985 are still the examples everybody reaches for.

a-ha's "Take On Me" used rotoscoping, drawing over live action frame by frame so the singer moves between a pencil sketch and the real world. It reportedly took months and thousands of individual drawings, and it is still one of the most recognisable pieces of animation in pop.

Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" went the other way, into early computer animation, with blocky rendered figures moving furniture. It looks primitive now in a way that "Take On Me" does not, but at the time it was startling, and it was pointed: a song about a man watching MTV and resenting it, animated by the exact technology the channel was making possible.

Both were directed by Steve Barron, who by this point had also made "Billie Jean" and had a strong claim to being the most quietly influential figure in the medium.

What it means for the puzzle

1985 videos tend to be very identifiable, because a good number of them are built around one technical or visual trick that nothing else looks like. Where a video has an unusual texture — animation, an effect, something that does not look photographed — it comes through the static as something obviously odd, and odd is a strong clue. If your first impression in round two is "that does not look like a normal video", you have narrowed things down considerably.

The 1985 videos in WTV

These 32 videos from 1985 appear in the game.

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