His is a name that you might not recognize, but if you were pop culturally cognizant in the 1980s, you know his work. As a director of music videos and television commercials, Bob Giraldi helped set the tone for the MTV era and was the creative force behind several cultural touchstones of the decade. Memorable videos that he helmed include Michael Jackson's "Beat It," the Jackson/Paul McCartney duet "Say Say Say," Lionel Richie's "Hello," and Pat Benetar's "Love Is a Battlefield." Giraldi also directed Pepsi commercials starring Richie and Jackson (including the infamous one in which Jackson was injured when his hair caught fire) and Miller beer ads featuring Joe Piscopo, Rodney Dangerfield, and others.

Born in 1939, Giraldi studied at the Pratt Institute and has a background in advertising in addition to forming his own production company in 1970. Giraldi's music videos were some of the first to move beyond showing the artist miming a song into more ambitious storytelling, with plots that often recalled classic Hollywood films – albeit in a very abbreviated form. In Jackson's award-winning "Beat It", the visuals work with the song's lyrics to tell a story of a nearly disastrous gang conflict. Featuring real-life gang members as extras (Jackson's idea), the climactic scene features two rivals engaged in a knife fight that Jackson breaks up, reminding the fighters that "It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right." The image of the red-jacketed Jackson leading the men in a dance became just as iconic as Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo, and contributed to one of the first classics of the video medium.

Although "Beat It" is usually cited as Giraldi's best video, I have a soft spot for Pat Benetar's "Love Is a Battlefield," which contains almost too much '80s goodness to bear. The plot is pure Hollywood melodrama: After a conflict with her father, Benetar's character runs away from home and ends up on the mean city streets, where she is forced to work in a sleazy dancehall to survive. Who can forget her dad shouting, "If you leave this house now," pausing strategically mid-sentence so Benetar can lip-synch the song's chorus, "you can just forget about coming back!" (Never mind that Benetar was thirty years old at the time.) The most memorable scene, though, takes place when another dancehall girl gets in a tussle with the nasty proprietor/pimp. Backed up by the other ladies, Pat intervenes and takes on the bad guy in an amazing dance routine in which she shimmy-dances him into submission! Triumphant, the women dance their way out of the sleazy establishment and Pat heads out of town on a bus – going home, or maybe to the next lonely city.

While some of his work hasn't aged as well (I'm talking to you, Jermaine Jackson and Pia Zadora), all in all Bob Giraldi made some truly ground-breaking early videos that pushed the limits of the medium. Giraldi continues to work as a filmmaker, producer, and restaurateur, among other activities, even as the legacy of his music videos lives on. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the fact that one of his works inspired a parody commercial two decades after the fact surely must prove his lasting impact.