25 Year-Old Music Video Marked a Defining Moment in Music Promos

On October 19, 1985, Norwegian band A-ha hit No. 1 with "Take on Me," a bloopy synth-pop song with a dangerously memorable keyboard line. Twenty-five years later, as the band prepares for its final concerts (A-ha is calling it quits after a trio of Oslo shows in early December) the song has caught on with a new generation, thanks largely to the enduring appeal of its quirky, half-animated music video in which a young woman reading a comic book joins the handsome protagonist in its newsprint pages for a brief adventure.

The famous video, however, like the version of the song we're familiar with today, was actually a second take. The band originally cut a less-electro rendition that was inspired by the Doors. "Ray Manzarek was hugely influential; he brought classical music into pop," keyboardist Magne Furuholmen told . "Manzarek's almost mathematical but very melodic, structured way of playing the keyboard was a huge influence in how I approached my instrument." However, the first cut of the song and its video (see below) were a flop.
A-ha band members convinced their label to let them return to the studio with producer Alan Tarney (Squeeze, Cliff Richard) to give it a second try. When they emerged with a brighter, poppier take of "Take on Me," Warner Bros. wanted to find a way to promote the band - "These young good-looking guys from Norway with a good pop song," the video's director, Steve Barron, recalls for the BBC - and handed Barron a generous budget and creative control. Barron had previously worked on Madonna's "Burning Up" and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" videos, and his credits include a handful more of the '80s most indelible hits - the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," Toto's "Africa," and Culture Club's "It's a Miracle" - along with another iconic animated clip, for Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." According to the BBC, the label connected Barron with animator Mike Patterson on the strength of a five-minute short that Patterson had made in school.

"Commuter" depicted a businessman navigating taxis and trains in a flickering, black-and-white, comic-book style that Patterson achieved via rotoscoping: drawing over live action frame by frame. He performed the same feat for "Take on Me," sketching 3,000 pictures over the course of 16 weeks on film shot of the band and actors and featured the fleeting, black-and-white living comic book style that was to become Take On Me's calling card. “Rotoscoping uses live action motion but my drawing style anyway was very loose and sketchy - no-one had really drawn anything like that style before," says Patterson, 53, now an animation lecturer at the University of Southern California.The final video - a love story crammed into 3 minutes and 45 seconds - became a mainstay on then 4-year-old MTV, and picked up six trophies at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards. "I have no doubt that the video made the song a hit," Furuholmen told Rolling Stone. "The song has a super catchy riff, but it is a song that you have to hear a few times. And I don't think it would've been given the time of day without the enormous impact of the video."
The cartoonish clip inspired Dustin McLean to make a "literal version" of the video in 2008, in which he sang lyrics describing the video's action in a surprisingly convincing approximation of frontman Morten Harket's vocals ("Close up eyes/hand comes out/sketchy arm/grab the hand!"). Furuholmen admitted to Rolling Stone that he thought the reimagined short was "fantastic": "The lyrics make so much more sense than the one we have!"