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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

<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 ...

I wish I could say it was a dark and stormy night when a mysterious package containing unknown DVDs was sent to me from the Walker Arts Center. Because, let’s be honest, it sounds more romantic. In ...

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 ...

I'm trying to convince my son that his generation did not invent music videos. I remember in the 1960s going to bars in New York that had juke boxes with video screens. It was 40 years ago, but I ...

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 ...

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 -- ...