Modern Talking — 100 Years

JUL 01 1987 · 12:00

Modern Talking — 100 Years (1987) Era: Late Eurodisco / European Synth-Pop Twilight (1987) - The final release of Modern Talking's original first era, coinciding with the duo's dissolution after six studio albums in three years. High. This video represents the closing statement of Modern Talking's original era — one of the most commercially successful German pop acts in history, with 65 million records sold across their first three-year run. Its fusion of Eurodisco performance conventions with a sci-fi dystopian concept, its intertextual use of Richard Burton samples, and its status as a period document of late-1987 European pop production make it an essential preservation artefact for the MTV REWIND archive. The video's rarity in terms of directorial documentation further increases its research value. Context: Released 9 November 1987 on Ariola Records, 'In 100 Years...' was the sole single from Modern Talking's sixth album, 'In the Garden of Venus', and proved to be the duo's final release before their split later that year. The track peaked at only number 30 in Germany — a notable commercial decline from their earlier five consecutive German number-one singles — while reaching number 4 in Spain, reflecting the duo's stronger residual popularity in Southern Europe. The song's lyrical premise — that a future dystopia might render love and human feeling illegal — aligned with broader late-Cold War anxieties about technological dehumanisation and nuclear threat, themes that resonate visually in the clip's sci-fi dressing. The use of Richard Burton's sampled narration from Jeff Wayne's 'Musical Version of The War of the Worlds' grounds the video in a broader tradition of European pop's engagement with serious literary and theatrical source material. Director notes: The video is catalogued on IMDb (tt7196906) and FilmAffinity as a 1987 short music video of the Sci-Fi / Musical genre. It features Thomas Anders and Dieter Bohlen. The song incorporates dialogue samples from Richard Burton's spoken introduction to Jeff Wayne's 'The War of the Worlds', which likely informed the video's dystopian visual concept. No production company, director, or DP is credited in any available database entry or release sleeve.