DO IT K-TEL’s WAY: K-Tel’s Entry and Exit into the Home Video Market

The seventies were indeed a grand decade for K-Tel International, the Canadian-based company hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba, which through hard sell TV advertising sold a variety of knick knacks for the home along with vinyl compilation albums that promised “20 Greatest Hits! 20 Great Stars”. K-Tel International’s vinyl compilations sold so well, that the vinyl records they pressed could be lined up and drive a trail to the moon. As the LP explosion of the seventies gave way to the home video boom of the eighties, perhaps they could have the same kind of success with K-Tel Video in Canada.

K-Tel’s first forays into the home video market came in 1983 with two releases that came on the promotional backs vinyl releases. Why not kill two birds with one stone, right?

The Mini Pops VHS had poorly made music videos inspired by the very successful K-Tel album of the same name which featured kids singing pop songs with the pitch and speed of the recording sped up slightly to make the kids sound more like, well kids. This was the first package to also include a cassette tape tie-in. If the kids couldn’t annoy their parents with watching the music videos, they could annoy them with their tape records. This format years later would become popular with the DVD/CD combos offered by other record companies.

K-Tel, ready to ride any type of pop culture wave rode the back of the Breakdance craze with an instructional video: Breakdance- You Can Do It. No-name talents went through breakdance moves to generic inspired version of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, while other breakdancers stood around clapping with encouragement. Decades later, this would be a much sought after tape.

Discount stores like Zellers and K-Mart in Canada racked these in their electronic departments. Along with The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, a terrible Vestron music compilation called Picture Music, and copies of Flashdance, K-Tel offered Canadians the first videotapes that they could own or rent. However, these titles still hovered in the $40-$50 range.

With two strong releases tied in with record albums, K-Tel followed, releasing Do it Debbie’s Way and Electric North. As Jane Fonda’s Workout became one of the hottest selling videotapes for the home market, K-Tel hit one for the blue haired crowd with Do it Debbie’s Way, featuring Debbie Reynolds, aimed at the older audience. The problem with this was this target audience was still not sold on the technology of VHS machines at the time. Sure, lots of seniors embraced the technology but still many older people would claim the VHS machines “too complicated”. 

Electric North is the first entirely all-Canadian music video compilation, coming out on the back of the album of the same name. While the album is filled with a dossier of bad hair bands such as Prism, Harlequin and Toronto, the VHS captures the gamut of the who’s who of Canadian music for the time including the likes Of Rough Trade, The Spoons and Chilliwack.

K-Tel International at this time wasn’t just entering the home video market but was investing tons of their capital in the oil industry. Right before that bubble went bust. Eventually the company would be thrown into bankruptcy.

With K-Tel’s failure into the oil business, their failing home video and gaming end was pointed at as part of the problem. Similar to the oil boom, K-Tel missed the peaks of the home video boom and while the tie-in product got racked in stores, they still were somewhat pricey. While discount stores would have racks with 50 copies of a Mini-Pops album, most stores carried no more than 5 copies of a K-Tel tape to sell. K-Tel was on the right path in regards to home video entertainment, but the price point failed.

While having a small library of releases, almost all of the K-Tel Video library has become highly collectable with collectors seeking the Breakdance and Mini Pops tapes, fetching years after their demise almost the same prices as their original retail. 

After the closing of K-Tel’s doors in Canada, its founder Phil Kives created K-5, while still trying to regain the rights to the K-Tel name. Noting the failings of K-Tel’s home video end, K-5 got it right, advertising their VHS tapes on television for the “reasonable” price of $19.95, offering such classics as Car Wars (monster trucks) and hockey blooper tapes. K-5 tapped into a market (low priced compilation tapes), and ran with it. 

While K-Tel might have failed with their home video venture, they were on the right track. Just three to four years after their beginning careers in selling tapes would we see a marketplace that considered this. As they changed the mark within music offering mass marketed music compilations, little did they know that the Zellers, K-Marts and Eatons stores that offered customers their slim pickings of tapes for purchase would open the floodgates for a world where everyone would have their own home entertainment archive.

Everyone.

Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #19 (the ever-popular VHS RIP issue).