This is “Fairies On The Beach: Fresh Campaign Girl” (JSF 1001) from JVC Victor’s S-VHS video tape system.
S-VHS was the high-resolution enhancement to the VHS video tape system which was so popular in the 80’s and 90’s. The main benefit of the S-VHS system was improved horizontal resolution (400 lines vs. VHS’s 250 or so lines), but it didn’t improve VHS’s abysmal color resolution and only slightly improved the noise floor of the picture. Since it’s improvements were not quite revolutionary and the tapes were not backwards compatible with standard VHS, it generally failed to take hold in the marketplace and there were very few prerecorded S-VHS tapes released.
“Fresh Campaign Girl” features three “campaign girls” (models who represented a company in marketing and promoting products or services) modeling mostly in bikinis. A couple of the models gained further recognition after this recording, mostly as actresses (such as Noriko Arai who was in the 2006 Death Note series). Besides the appeal of the content itself, it does provide a great, high-detail environment to show off the nascent S-VHS format’s strength. Yes, this was produced by JVC-Victor. Yes, you probably shouldn’t watch this at work.
The soundtrack to “Fresh Campaign Girl” is comprised of tunes from the album “Front and Rear” by the Horii Katsumi Project, a popular Japanese Jazz-Fusion/Jazz Rock band that was signed to Victor, combined with some miscellaneous stock tracks. In a nice change of pace, JVC Victor went out of their way to credit the Horii Katsumi Project’s tracks featured in this video, a move that most similar BGV-like recordings did not do (instead leaving credits only on the tape’s box or leaving the artist credits out entirely).
Fun fact: A year before this video was released, Sony released their own campaign girl video titled “WoW! ’88 Campaign Girls” for their own high-resolution ED Betamax format. Featuring a similar collection of campaign girls paired with a collection of jazz-fusion tunes by Chocolate & a couple Sony signed artists, it’s also an enjoyable watch. You can see my upload of that footage here: https://youtu.be/I4wlFws5CsI
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Chapters (by model & song):
00:00 – Emi Nakayama (What’s New, Mr.Jolly Joker / ??? / ??? / ???)
13:37 – Mamiko Mise (Love Affair (Stock) / ??? / Oneway Traveler)
22:26 – Noriko Arai (??? / Funny Sidekick)
Do you know any of the missing songs? Comment below and get credited for your contributions!
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This was played back using a restored Victor HR-W1 W-VHS player.
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