Revisit Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Reinvented Music Videos & Pop Culture
In the eighties, people lamented the attention-span-shortening “MTV-ization” of visual culture. By the mid-nineties, networks were trying to figure out how to get viewers to sit through music videos at all. A solution arrived in the form of Pop-Up Video, a program pitched by creators Woody Thompson and Tad Low to VH1 when that much-less-cool MTV clone found itself struggling to stay carried by cable providers. It had an appealingly low-budget concept: take existing music videos, and spice them up with text bubbles containing facts about the artists, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and amusing (if semi-relevant) trivia. “We got a lot of resistance from VH1. They owned Blockbuster Video at the time, so they knew no one rented foreign films because no one wanted to read the TV.” So recalls Low in a Billboard interview about the history of the show, which originally ran from 1996 to 2002 (with a brief revival in 2011 and 2012). Like many cultural phenomena beloved of millennials, Pop-Up Video has received the oral-history treatment more than once: Uproxx also did one a …