Take On Me: The Flop That a Pencil-Sketch Video Turned Immortal

By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-06-27

Take On Me, by Norway’s a-ha and released in its definitive form in 1985, is the great proof that the right video can rescue a song the public has already passed over. Earlier versions had been released and flopped. The melody, the synth hook, Morten Harket’s soaring falsetto — all of it existed and went largely unnoticed. What changed everything was a picture.

The video that drew itself

The hit version arrived with a now-legendary music video that blended live action and rotoscoped pencil-sketch animation — a comic-book world drawn frame by frame, with the band sketched in moving lines. It was painstaking, thousands of hand-treated frames, and it became an instant MTV landmark. Audiences who had ignored the song couldn’t ignore the image, and the record finally took off.

The leap

And then there’s that vocal. Harket’s jump into the high falsetto on the hook is one of the widest leaps in mainstream pop — a genuine feat that the song dares him to clear in front of everyone, every time. Pure exhilaration, engineered into a single phrase.

What it measures like

On our scale it’s bright, fast and high-energy — classic propulsive synth-pop built for momentum and joy, not stillness. Full profile on its song page.

Take On Me reached its hit form in 1985 (from a-ha’s Hunting High and Low), after earlier releases underperformed; its breakthrough is widely credited to the rotoscoped video and a re-recording. No lyrics are reproduced.