1986

If you had to pick one year where the 80s music video was at the absolute top of its craft, 1986 has a strong case.

Sledgehammer

Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" is the video that turns up in every conversation about the form, and it deserves to. It is stop motion animation, made with the involvement of the people who would later make Wallace and Gromit, with Gabriel lying under a sheet of glass for a full day at a time while the animators worked frame by frame over his face. Fruit moves. Trains run over his head. Chickens dance.

It reportedly took around a week of shooting to produce four minutes, and it became the most played video in MTV's history. What makes it work is that it is genuinely joyful. A lot of ambitious videos are ambitious in a rather grim, self-important way. This one is having an enormous amount of fun.

The other end of the scale

The same year produced Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love", which is almost the opposite approach: a fixed camera, a black background, a man in a suit and a row of identically styled models miming at instruments. It cost a fraction of "Sledgehammer" and is arguably just as recognisable, because it commits absolutely to one image. It has been parodied so many times that the parodies are famous independently of the original.

Between those two poles is most of what the 80s video could do: build something extraordinary frame by frame, or find one image so strong that repeating it for four minutes is enough.

What it means for the puzzle

1986 is a good year for the static reveal in both directions. The high concept videos are unmistakable the moment any of the picture arrives. The single-image videos are, if anything, even easier, because the composition never changes, so whatever fragment you get in round two is the same fragment you would get in round five. When a video resolves into a fixed, symmetrical, high-contrast image, think about this stretch of the decade.

The 1986 videos in WTV

These 31 videos from 1986 appear in the game.

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