I don’t mean to slander his legacy, but the news this week of the death of Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go,” made me think of Scopitone, the proto-video platform for cheesily risqué musical films ...

Photo: Walker Art Center Cable boxes couldn’t be hooked up fast enough in August of 1981. People said I want my MTV. Music videos blew our minds as we watched for hours on end a steady rotation of our ...

About 15 years ago, vernacular photo collector Nicholas Osborn was rummaging through a flea market in Wisconsin when he came across a bunch of 16-millimeter reels. They featured kitschy performances ...

Scopitones are three minute long 16mm films that were viewed on a Scopitone machine, a jukebox-like player. A precursor to music videos, Scopitones -- both the films and the machines -- were popular ...

<b>BEFORE YOUTUBE,</b> before VH1, even before MTV, there were Scopitones. <p>Scopitones were large, wood-paneled contraptions from the 1960’s that played sound and showed a video on ...

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Long before MTV, entertainment moguls looked for ways to get proto-“music videos” in front of fans’ eyes. As early as the ’30s, home-movie buffs with sound systems could order short film reels of ...

In the hip and swinging days of the 1960s, a strange contraption called the Scopitone jukebox seemed poised to be the next big thing. The machine the size of a refrigerator projected short films -- ...