Detail from "Dare to Be Stupid"
On Tuesday 27th August 2024, the following message was sent out across social media by the brilliant parody singer and songwriter “Weird Al” Yankovic: “About a year ago, my old record label replaced all my old music videos with upscaled HD/4K versions. Some folks really liked it, and some folks really didn't. Well, I hate for anybody to be disappointed, so now BOTH versions are available on YouTube - take your pick!”
I wasn’t aware that the original versions of some songs had been removed from view. I love the videos for “Living with a Hernia”, Weird Al’s take on James Brown’s “Living in America”, and the note-perfect Devo pastiche “Dare to Be Stupid”, as much as the songs themselves, and the artistry in matching the spirit of their targets both audibly and visually means they have to be taken together.
MTV came along at the perfect time for Weird Al, and just as changes in consuming music means he now puts out songs as and when they are ready, rather than waiting to compile an album’s worth of material, it is natural that YouTube would present the perfect opportunity to lay out your life’s work as accessibly as possible.
However, I made the mistake of looking at the upscaled videos on my phone first – the pictures seemed a little sharper, and the colours more vibrant, which led me to think that they have gone to the original source, whether that be film, or a tape format like U-Matic or Betacam, and made a new scan.
"I Lost on Jeopardy" - what happened to the categories?
This is clearly not what has happened, seen most clearly on the video for “I Lost on Jeopardy”. The film was originally uploaded in 2009, and while the picture quality is listed as “480p”, the picture itself is soft, like it came from a standard format VHS cassette, which can only achieve half this resolution. The upscaling, listed as 1080p HD format, appears to have been made from this version, using an A.I. upscaling program: outlines are suddenly sharp, and surfaces smoothed out, with text suddenly coming into focus the nearer the camera gets, particularly detrimental with the video’s need to show you a standard “Jeopardy” question board.
A.I. has been used in film preservation for years, helping in the more menial correction tasks like picture stabilisation, and removing scratches and dust that weren’t already caught by photochemical and other cleaning processes. Even then, this requires close examination of what has been done – I remember watching an explanation of the restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis”, showing that the interpolation performed between individual frames that removed scratches and excessive film grain also removed the bottom of someone’s leg, which had to be manually corrected.
It is important to note that, like some people may refuse to watch a film or television programme because it is in black and white instead of colour, it is feasible that rejecting a work because it is not in “standard definition” is possible, which may have prompted the original A.I. transfer of Weird Al’s videos. The ephemeral nature of music videos may mean that master tapes are harder to find, but the care and attention could have been used to ensure the highest-possible quality of these videos simply costs more money than running them through an A.I. scanner program. Perhaps running a previous DVD of Weird Al’s work through an upscaling Blu-ray player, interpolating the picture to HD quality as it goes, would have produced a better effect.
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