Before "Take On Me" became a global hit, a-ha had already tried and failed to make it work — twice.
The song went through three distinct lives. The first version, produced by Tony Mansfield and remixed by John Ratcliff, was released on October 19, 1984, in Norway. It flopped. A second version, produced by Alan Tarney for the Hunting High and Low album, was released as a single in the UK on April 5, 1985, and in the US on June 17. It also failed to chart. Early low-budget videos were shot for these versions — including a straightforward performance clip — but none gained traction. The song seemed dead.
Then came the gamble. Warner Bros. executives Jeffrey Ayeroff and John Beug had seen a student short film called "Commuter" by animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, and championed their rotoscoping technique for the new video. Director Steve Barron — fresh off helming Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" — took the concept and built it into a love story that moved between the real world and the pages of a comic book.
The production was grueling. Live-action footage was shot first, with Morten Harket and Bunty Bailey performing the cafe romance. That footage was then traced frame by frame — pure analog, no digital tools — into pencil-sketch animation. Patterson handled the drawing while Reckinger created the mattes that made the transitions between live action and animation look seamless. The process took six months in total, with 16 weeks dedicated to producing approximately 3,000 hand-drawn frames.
The result was unlike anything MTV had aired before. The seamless popping in and out between pencil-sketch comic panels and real-world footage felt genuinely magical. When the Tarney version of the song was re-released on September 16, 1985 — this time paired with the rotoscope video — everything changed. "Take On Me" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 19, 1985, spending 27 weeks on the chart. It peaked at number two in the UK and topped charts across Europe.
At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, the video won six of its eight nominations: Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice. It lost only Best Group Video and Video of the Year. Fellow a-ha video "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." picked up two more awards that night, giving the Norwegian trio eight VMAs in a single ceremony.
Behind the scenes, the video was a major investment from Warner Bros. in a band that had already released two failed versions of the same song. The visual storytelling made all the difference.
The video's afterlife has been remarkable. It passed one billion YouTube views on February 17, 2020, and in September 2024 became the first music video from the 1980s to reach two billion views. In 2017, a-ha recorded a stripped-down acoustic version for MTV Unplugged, though the original remains the definitive version. And in one of those life-imitating-art footnotes: Bunty Bailey and Morten Harket dated after the shoot, briefly living out the comic book romance for real.
Watch the video
