Synopsis

ELO's "So Serious" intercuts three surreal, loosely connected stories with black-and-white performance footage of the band. A woman becomes stranded on railroad tracks when her Pontiac stalls, a swimmer suffers defeat at a colorful meet, and a suited traveler encounters a mysterious ghostly woman at a railway station. The visual tone shifts between danger, disappointment, and romantic uncertainty, reflecting the song's question about whether heartbreak and misfortune really need to be taken so seriously. The video closes with a stylized ELO logo assembled from images of the three stories.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video presents ELO as a seven-piece group, even though "So Serious" contains no string parts. Louis Clark and Dave Morgan are shown miming cello, while Mik Kaminski appears on violin.

• Martin Smith, Louis Clark, and Dave Morgan appear in only this ELO video.

• The performance footage is shot in black and white, while the three narrative sections use striking primary-color filters, giving the video a deliberately artificial, late-1980s look.

• The opening features a 1974 Pontiac Bonneville convertible. Extra car sounds were added to the song for the video, and the railway-crossing alarm blends into the track's opening siren.

• A starter-gun sound was added at the beginning of the swimming-race sequence.

• The train-track story resolves in an intentionally surreal way: the train passes through the stranded car instead of destroying it.

• The animated ending builds the ELO logo from images associated with the three stories. The "L," "E," and "O" each introduce a different narrative thread.

• The song was released in 1986 on "Balance of Power," ELO's final studio album before its initial breakup.

• "So Serious" marked the last ELO video appearances of both Mik Kaminski and Bev Bevan in Jeff Lynne's ELO.