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Steve Barron’s award-winning 1985 video for a-ha’s “Take On Me” is pioneering in many ways. It boasts an astonishing blend of live action and animation and ambitiously uses the rotoscoping technique. That the song’s great too certainly doesn’t hurt. But as much as I’ve always loved it (and who doesn’t? It pulled down six MTV astronaut statuettes and is still considered one of the best videos of all time), I have to admit that, yeah, it’s stylish as hell, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

OK: You’ve got a cute girl in a diner flipping through a comic book (yeah, like that’d ever happen), then hunky-poo vocalist Morten Harket breaks through his charcoal chains and beckons her inside, where the two young lovers run from wrench-wielding racecar goons. Wasn’t she better off just slurping coffee in a greasy spoon, minding her own lonely business? Handsome or not, Morten’s got some nerve dragging that chick into his dangerous adventure. But perhaps she just hallucinated the whole incident; the diner staff finds her dazed and disheveled near the trash. Back at her apartment, there’s Harket again in cartoon form, slamming against walls like William Hurt in Altered States until he becomes sweaty, whole, and human. Oh, what Norwegian cutie pies wouldn’t do for amour.

Some anonymous Interwebs genius has done what many of us have been wanting to for years: make sense out of the “Take On Me” video by re-recording the song to fit the storyline. Enjoy!

“Take On Me”: Literal Version:

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