Readers’ Poll: The 10 Greatest Videos of the 1980s

The Cars' 1984 video for "You Might Think" won the Video of the Year trophy at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards. Very few videos were utilizing computer graphics at the time and it was highly influential, but one must admit it comes off as a little creepy today. Model/actress Susan Gallagher is simply trying to go to the dentist, take a bath and get ready for bed, but creepy Ric Ocasek just won't leave her alone. He shows up in her lipstick, in her bathtub and in her mouth at the dentist – even taking the form of a fly and King Kong.  The rest of the band show up at the movie theater and on her bar of soap in the tub. MTV showed this over and over again in 1984, and somewhere, Peter Gabriel was certainly paying attention. 

The most remarkable thing about Michael Jackson's 1982 video for "Billie Jean" is how simple the whole thing is. There are no dancing gang members, zombie armies or anything that required a lot of time and money. There's merely a bum in a back alley, a mysterious photographer in sunglasses and a fedora, a floor that lights up and a cat that turns into a lion. At the end, Jackson visits Billie Jean and disappears before the cops can catch him.  

MTV originally refused to play the video but once they did, Thriller started flying off shelves. It wasn't long before Jackson started to get more ambitious, though he never quite recaptured the simple magic of "Billie Jean."

It's impossible to say how many 1980s metal fans went out and bought the 1938 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun after seeing the video for Metallica's "One," but it's probably quite a few. Haunting clips from the 1971 film adaptation are sprinkled throughout "One," which was Metallica's very first video. They refused to make one for years, but they saw a huge spike in sales after they relented. It's far from a conventional video, and lines like "If I had arms I could kill myself" are tattooed in the brains of countless Metallica fans. It was also the exact opposite of everything that Mötley Crüe and other metal bands of the era were doing. 

"Boys of Summer" looked like nothing else on MTV in 1985. Don Henley hired French director Jean-Baptiste Mondino to create the work; drawing inspiration from French New Wave movies, he created a stark, black-and-white mini-movie about a man looking back at lost love. (Contrary to appearances, the guy at the desk isn't Glenn Frey.) It won Video of the Year and Best Direction at the 1985 Video Music Awards, and the real Glenn Frey passed out the statue. 

The video for "When Doves Cry" launched on MTV right as Prince's fame was peaking. It hit the network the exact same time that Purple Rain was arriving in movie theaters, and clips from the movie are sprinkled into the movie. The mirror effect looks a little cheesy today, but it was cutting-edge back in 1984.

This is Prince at his most iconic, and this is the type of outfit Dave Chappelle wears when he dresses up like him. What's more, Prince somehow managed to make getting out of a weird, smoky bathtub in a purple room seem sexy. 

Van Halen knew exactly what kids wanted to see in music videos: hot chicks, a classroom that turns into a strip club and blistering guitar solos. They delivered all that and more in "Hot for Teacher." It's far from a deep song, and the video is even more wonderfully shallow. Norwegian model Lillian Müller (August 1976's Playmate of the Year) played the teacher, and they shot the thing at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. It really pissed off Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center, which certainly did nothing but make the thing even more popular.  

It may not seem all that impressive now, but Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" video was hugely groundbreaking in 1986. Keep in mind, they made it with less computer power than most toasters have these days. Steve Barron, the genius behind the "Billie Jean" and "Take on Me" clips, talked Mark Knopfler into the computer animation idea.

The video was created to go into heavy rotation on MTV. The song even repeatedly says, "I want my MTV," even if it's gently mocking rock stars and their fans. The video helped bring Dire Straits into stadiums all over America and it remains the most famous thing they ever did, even though their involvement was pretty minimal. 

The video for "Take on Me" wasn't created by computer animation, but rather a team that painstakingly rotoscoped sketch drawings frame-by-frame onto film. The entire thing took 16 weeks, but it was all worth it. The video swept the 1986 Video Music Awards and broke Norwegian pop band a-ha in America.

Ever wonder what happened to the guy and the girl after he broke free from the drawings? Check out the sequel video, "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." Hint: Things don't go very well, though the two actors did briefly date in real life. 

Former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel was fairly popular when his "Sledgehammer" video hit the airwaves, but once MTV put it into heavy rotation, his career was never the same. "I think it was the most played video on MTV, and still is today," he told Rolling Stone in 2012. "But I was trying to get some income from it, which is another battle, another story." Stephen R. Johnson directed the video, and was helped along by the same animation team that went on to create Wallace and Gromit. It's endlessly inventive, moving wildly from dancing chickens to flying fruit to a dance party in a room with spinning furniture. He tried a few times to follow it up with even more impressive videos, but they always fell short. 

What more is there to say about the video for "Thriller?" It's a video so iconic that 30 years later, people all over the world are still recreating the thing, from goofy white people at weddings to hundreds of inmates at a prison in the Philippines. The 13-minute video was directed by Jonathan Landis at a time when Thriller began falling down the charts. That stopped the second the video hit MTV. It captured the attention of the entire country and forever changed music videos. They were never again seen as simple clips meant to promote records: "Thriller" turned them into an art form.