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 ...

In some 500 bars, restaurants and servicemen’s clubs throughout the U.S., the center of attention these days is a monstrous new machine called Scopitone. It is a cross between a jukebox and TV. For ...

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 ...

That which we now call a “music video” is more than it seems to be — the idea is immutable, obvious, and at least as old as visual recording devices. Above is Della Reese in a typically literal and ...

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 ...