Customer Reviews

Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the '80's, Vol. 1 [VHS]

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New Wave Hit's of the 80's, Vol.1 (Just Can't Get Enough)

Videos: (35 minutes total)-

Cars-Gary Numan, Girls On Film-Duran Duran, I Want Candy-Bow Wow Wow, Love Plus One-Haircut 100, Twilight Zone-Golden Earring, She Blinded Me With Science-Thomas Dolby, Come On Eileen-Dexy's Midnight Runners, Poison Arrow-Abc I Eat Cannibals-Total Coelo, Life In A Northern Town-Dream Academy

Okay, so you're shocked to realize that you're over 30 and MTV doesn't play 'real' music videos anymore... what to do???

Spend your hard earned discretionary income on video compilations of off-beat New Wave bands?!? Sounds most excellent!!! And in this case it would be... really, except for the following:

1) There are no hard dates given for any of the videos. No production dates, no release dates, no idea when the video first appeared. This really bothers me. Human memory is sometimes quite fickle, and I don't feel like playing pop-culture archeologist for every video on the tape. Just a few brief blurbs on the back of the box would have been really nice.

2) The run-time of each video isn't listed either. This gets annoying if you'd like to know whether a particular video is an 'extended' version or not... which quickly brings us to:

3) Some of the videos are extended or un-cut editions that rarely saw the light of day in the 80's. Sometimes this is good. For example, Duran Duran's 'Girls On Film' is complete with full-frontal female nudity. And while I'm not complaining, I'm pretty sure I didn't see that version playing on MTV back when I was a kid. (Talk about 'I want my MTV'!) Also, 'Come On Eileen' by Dexy's Midnight Runners is an extended version with a painfully drawn out bridge. (You really wouldn't believe how much it hurts to watch.) I remember the shorter, bouncier version, and I really missed not seeing it. A great idea would have been to present both the 'standard' and extended/un-cut versions of the same video played back to back for comparison. At only 35 minutes total play time for the entire tape, this could have easily been done. And speaking of the actual video tape...

4) The overall tape quality is shockingly poor. There are audio drops and video skips throughout. Most of the video images are fuzzy at best, and the audio doesn't exactly thunder either. Rhino used a very cheap tape, a very cheap duplication method, or both, and it really shows.

The Bottom Line:

Get this tape if it's reasonably priced, but don't expect too much in the way of technical presentation. The videos themselves are either loved or hated on their own merit. It's just that the end result of slapping them together on a video tape could have been done so much better.

These tapes (as released by Rhino to compliment their NEW WAVE HITS cd's) are a true time capsule of the day, and that day is from 1981 - 1985. A day of Solid Gold on tv, Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, and a day when MTV showed about 100 different videos a week all the time. We all remember when we first saw some of these videos and asked ourselves, "What is that guy in Flock of Seagulls thinking about his hair?" The video is "I Ran", their first to hit ourside of the Atlantic. It was plain, simple, and the song was catchy, and we loved it. We loved it so much, we even could stand watching the Bananarama clones Toto Coelo and their cheesy pop classic "I Eat Cannibals" (with even cheezier video. Not to be forgotten though are what the world thought of as true pioneers of the form are Duran Duran. The James Bondesque mini-movies were your favorites to watch and you know you sat up until 3 in the morning to catch a glimpse of the fab five. Videos by Taco, The Fixx, Berlin, ABC, Kajagoogoo are also splashed about to paint the full picture of when MTV was young and music was experiencing a renaissance and the video age was growing. This is a great nostalgia piece for the 20 year olds on up.