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‘Pop Up Video’ Retooled for a New Decade
“They’re all married now, with families,” Mr. Thompson said wistfully by phone from Los Angeles. “Nobody had real lives back then.” “Back then” was 1996, and the band was really the staff of “Pop Up Video,” the humorous music-video explainer beloved by one generation — and about to be introduced to another. “Pop Up” was shown on VH1 until 2002. Now, as the channel tries to realign with music, “Pop Up” will return as a midday show, starting Monday. But just as much of the staff under Mr. Thompson, one of the show’s creators, has moved on, so too have the artists who once helped “Pop Up” become VH1’s top-rated show, and long gone is the golden era of voracious video consumption. When “Pop Up” had its debut, peppered with balloon captions filled with trivia and gossip annotating each video, VH1 was two years into a “Music First” makeover led by “Video Countdown.” MTV was still the music-oriented channel fans now pine for, broadcasting videos around the clock on certain shows. The Box, a channel fueled by call-in video orders, was thriving. And this was all before the genre’s late-1990s fever pitch moment. MTV wouldn’t unveil “Total Request Live” until 1998, the same year a 16-year-old named Britney Spears donned schoolgirl tartans and shot the video for “... Baby One More Time,” which came out the next year. “Pop Up” sliced through the cultural landscape by giving music fans exactly what they wanted: credibility, not to mention some ironic distance. In other words, fans could simultaneously <a href="http://www.uggssalediscount.com/"><strong>ugg sale</strong></a> enjoy and skewer pop’s latest output. “People felt it communicated: ‘I read my music videos,’ ” Mr. Thompson said. But by 2002 both artists and fans were becoming less interested in videos, and VH1 decided the “Pop Up” concept was exhausted. “We expanded, did some episodes of ‘Brady Bunch’ and ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’ ” Mr. Thompson said. “But everyone still felt it had run its course. Everyone but us.” The show’s last episode was that August. Mr. Thompson packed up his Bowery apartment and headed for Los Angeles. “I didn’t pitch VH1 for a decade,” he said. “And I didn’t hear from them either.” Then, a year ago, Mr. Thompson met with Shelly Tatro, VH1’s senior vice president for production and programming, who was with the company during the heyday of “Pop Up.” The show that resulted from that meeting quickly fizzled, but “in our last <a href="http://www.northfacesales-discount.com"><strong>north face discount sales</strong></a> conversation I said to Shelly in a jokey way, ‘Call me when you want to bring back ‘Pop Up,’ ” Mr. Thompson said. “Three months later she called.” Ms. Tatro said, “It had always been near and dear to my heart.” She wasn’t alone. “Bringing the show back was a no-research gut decision,” the channel’s president, Tom Calderone, said. “People were so loud about how much they missed it, we said, ‘Let’s just do it.’ ” The musician Pete Wentz, host of VH1’s coming special “100 Greatest Songs of the ’00s,” was a junior in high school when “Pop Up” had its debut; he was instantly hooked. “The show made every video more interesting,” he said. Of course much of its charm came from the yet-unknown information it presented, uncovered by researchers in constant contact with musicians’ camps. (An average video takes two staffers a week to research, then another few days to write, with 25 videos in progress at a time.) The missives were short, their content grabby. Today it’s a mode familiar enough to be obvious. “ ‘Pop Up’ beat Twitter to its own game,” Ms. Tatro said. Saul Austerlitz, the author of “Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes,” said, “The show first struck a chord because it allowed people to have that experience” they would later get with social media. The parallel initially concerned Mr. Thompson. After all, fans are perfectly capable of searching Google for relevant information while simultaneously watching a video. “For that generation who’s getting their first taste, I worried that we’d be seen as a rip-off of current culture,” he said. That wasn’t the only problem that the Internet posed. The backstage stories once first gleaned by “Pop Up” researchers were already spattered across the Web. Mr. Thompson wasn’t as worried by that. “It’s <a href="http://www.northfacejackets-discount.com"><strong>north face jackets</strong></a> not what we tell you,” he said. “It’s when we tell you it. The moment Britney bends over, we tell you a story about K-Fed. ...” He trailed off. “You know.” And “Pop Up” is taking some advantage of the Internet; on its Web site you can inscribe your own captions on videos. Other than that and a few tweaks to graphics, the show has barely had a touchup. It’s fitting, since the videos it dissects have a much cleaner look these days. Mr. Thompson has lamented this shift for ages. Videos are often “essentially glorified GQ shoots on a soundstage in Midtown,” he said. “There’s just not always that much to talk about.” As Mr. Austerlitz explained, “Videos have changed to reflect their environment. They’re smaller, lighter and made for people to watch at their desks. It’s not a superstar medium anymore.” Mr. Thompson is well aware but not at all deterred. “I’d rather make fun of those indie bands with all the credibility and convince everybody that hey, Lindsay Lohan is actually a good singer,” he said. “That’s the game: to always keep you second-guessing what you see.”
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