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’90s Nostalgia and the Return of “Pop-Up Video”

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I graduated from high school at some point in the 1990s (that’s all you’re getting from me!), so I can’t help but notice that ’90s nostalgia is everywhere lately. (Kids, put the acid wash jeans away. Please.) If you’ve spent time on FanStuff’s Facebook page, you saw my reaction to MTV’s recent fantasy casting of a live-action “Daria” feature film, and today I learned that sister station VH1 is preparing to reboot its classic series, “Pop-Up Video”  after a decade-long hiatus.

For the uninitiated, “Pop-Up Video” is your typical video show gone TMI. Basically, a video of some hit song plays as little info bubbles pop up (get it?) throughout the clip that explain a bit more about the artist and/or the video itself. It sounds simple, but the brilliance of the show lies in the info inside the bubbles. There’s a reason this decade is known for its snark. Take a look at a couple of videos to see what I mean.

The series will launch with 60 new episodes this fall. The one major addition — the one that’s got me all excited, anyway — is a new emphasis on hip-hop videos, a genre sorely missing from the show’s first go-round. Those clips were off limits to VH1 because MTV handled all the hip-hop coverage back then, but I sure wish “Pop-Up Video” was around to skewer something as awesomely ridiculous as this.

Of course, if you’ve ever been on any kind of social media, you already know that brevity is the soul of snark. That fact isn’t at all lost on co-creator Woody Thompson, who has seen the stick-and-move style he helped pioneer in 1996 with “Pop-Up Video” absolutely blow up with the advent of sites like Facebook and Twitter — and that doesn’t include the many, many imitation videos I saw on YouTube as I researched this post. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, “I have sat on the sidelines for the last decade and watched as everyone and [his] brother has ripped off ‘Pop-Up‘ in some way or another with the Internet coming out of nowhere and Twitter being hauntingly familiar and all of these devices that are using snarky, pithy text.” Sounds like the perfect guy to bring 90s-style wit back to television.

Know any music videos that could use the “Pop-Up Video” treatment? Leave some links in the comments, please!


Filed under: PopStuff Tagged: '90s nostalgia, MTV, pop-up video, snark, VH1

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