Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

get the message of “Take on Me” across and help it achieve sales of nearly 10 million copies worldwide.

REANIMATING A HIT
    A performance video for the original version of “Take on Me” had already been filmed, but Warner Bros. was looking for something new, different, and captivating. Director Steve Barron had worked on movie sets for years and had already made an impact in music videos with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” the Human League’s
    “Don’t You Want Me,” Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” and others. In 1985, he was ready to break out of the mold of traditional music videos (which usually had slim budgets that left little room for creativity). “Take on Me” was given £100,000—an enormous budget at the time, especially since the band was unknown and had a sketchy track record. But Warner Bros. believed the investment would pay off. Barron went to work creating a story that mixed live action and animation.
    The video’s story opens with comic-book art of a motorcycle race. A cartoon version of Harket fights off the attacks of his competitors to win the race fair and square. The scene then shifts to a woman in a café who’s reading the comic while a waitress serves her coffee. Suddenly the woman notices movement on the page. An animated Harket winks at her, and then his hand pops
through the table to invite her into his world. She follows, and their flirtation begins.
    The couple’s happiness is short-lived, however. The waitress believes the woman has left without paying her bill, and she crumples the comic and throws it in the garbage. Meanwhile, the thugs from the motorcycle race return with wrenches in hand to beat Harket. The couple runs away, and Harket pushes the woman back into the real world, where she emerges in the trash. She grabs the comic, runs from the restaurant, and hurries home to finish reading to find out the fate of her new love.
    She reads on and feels helpless when she sees that Harket has been beaten savagely and may be dead. As her tears fall, she sees him awaken to struggle against the boundaries of the comic book, a scene that also plays out in the hallway of her apartment. As Harket crashes against the walls, his body transforms from animation to real over and over again. As the song ends, Harket emerges, sweaty but flesh and blood, and the two embrace.

LOVE BITES
    The video was partially shot on a soundstage and at a real restaurant, Kim’s Café, in the Wandsworth section of London. The woman in the video was played by Bunty Bailey, an actress, dancer, and model. Romance sparked for Bailey and Harket on the set, but it didn’t last. After dating Harket, Bailey appeared as a backup singer in the video for Billy Idol’s hit “To Be a Lover,” which reached #6 on the Billboard charts in 1986.
    Things didn’t work out much better for the fictional lovers in “Take on Me,” either. The video for the follow-up song, “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” opened with the couple staring into each other’s eyes when Harket begins to switch back to his comic-book form. He doubles over in pain while Bailey helplessly watches, and then he runs off. A strong burst of light follows, and “The End” pops up on the scene.

THE TAKE ON “TAKE ON ME”
    For its animation, “Take on Me” relied entirely on rotoscoping, a process in which live-action film is projected onto a surface and traced by an animator. Barron asked the record company for three
months to work on the video (most were produced in a couple of days), and he got it. Lead animator Michael Patterson and 13 other illustrators embarked on the painstaking process involving more than 2,000 drawn images for the video.
    The video’s tumultuous finale was an homage to the 1980 movie Altered States , which starred William Hurt as a man who evolves and devolves in an attempt to learn the meaning of life through sensory deprivation. The ending of the movie features Hurt violently switching