"Take on Me" may very well be the most popular song of the 80's overall but very few people remember the rest of the tracks and that album and well, there were some good ones in there. But let's focus on the only song that people remember that A-Ha made.... for now.
Just like anyone else that was alive in 1986, "Take on me" was a major part of that year. Things were changing a lot musically at the time: Glam rock was in full swing and Guns 'N Roses was just a few years away from releasing their "Appetite for Destruction" album which would change rock music very quickly and then fizzle out with the surprise introduction of Nirvana.
However, for 1986, A-Ha was king. They won like all the awards at the only recently invented MTV awards and that used to be an important thing. Since MTV doesn't really feature music videos anymore, i would be surprised if anyone places any importance on their nomination there anymore, but there was a time....
It wasn't just the catch song, but the video was unlike anything that had ever been done before. The artwork mixed with live action was pretty incredible for its time. Nowadays I would imagine we look at this and think (correctly) that Pixar would bang this project out in an afternoon. In 1985 each frame had to be drawn individually and then mixed in with live action. I can't find any real statistics, but you can imagine that there was hundreds of takes to end up with the finished product seeing as how all the "cartoony" stuff was literally drawn with pencils and then had to be placed on to actual physical film to complete the video. There was no photoshop or graphic design software like we have today in 1986 and it was an incredibly arduous process according to Michael Patterson - the artist behind the legendary video.
I think these days we take a lot of these things for granted because a group of students at random-ass university can bang out something far more advanced than this video for a group project using todays's computers. Consider this though: each and every frame of "Take on Me" had to be hand drawn over the course of 4 months, more than 3000 images... in my mind that makes it pretty dern special.
Take on Me was not an immediate hit on its own, it had actually be released twice before and the version that we hear now accompanied by the video is actually the 3rd try. It didn't even top the charts in A-Ha's native Norway on the first 2 tries. However, like they say... "3rd time's a charm!" and along with the video, "Take on me" swept the U.K., USA, and the world in 1986.
A-Ha actually has something like a dozen more albums after this one and you should have a look at them, but since I blog all the time, I will likely introduce you to them one-by-one (ok, not all of them, some are crap.)