Trivia heads, here's one for you: which Sega character presented an MTV Video Music Award in 2000?

If you said “Ulala from Space Channel 5”, good guess! Here’s IGN announcing that event in August:

Sega was a big sponsor of last year's edition of the event many consider the Super Bowl of the teen market, and that role looks to continue this year. But there's a slight difference involving one Ulala of Space Channel 5 fame.

Ulala will be featured on the year 2000 MTV Music Video Awards, as previously revealed by Sega, but today we have first news of her role in the show. Apparently, she will appear in CG form as a presenter during the Best Dance Video award.

Tune your tubes to MTV on 9/7/2000 to be a part of it all.¹

Here's Gamespot:

Sultry Space Channel 5 heroine Ulala will be making a computer-generated appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Ulala, appearing in her CG form, will be presenting the Best Dance Video award at the show. The Video Music Awards will be held on September 7. Sega of America is also one of the primary co-sponsors of the event.²

And here's that stalwart source of information, Wikipedia, backing the assertion with two citations; the Gamespot article, and an interview with Sega of America's Peter Moore:

Ulala also appeared in a CG form at the 2000 MTV Music Awards to present the award for Best Dance Video.³

It was a perfect match. The sci-fi news-reporting go-go dancer was a memorable, marketable character with a musical connection, and Sega were a returning event sponsor; they'd heavily promoted the Dreamcast at the 1999 VMAs. The cross-promotion made natural sense.

But there’s a catch to this otherwise perfect nugget of trivia; a nagging little question.

If Ulala presented the award for Best Dance Video at the 2000 VMAs, why does nobody remember seeing it?

I asked around on social media a while back, trying to find anyone who saw the Ulala award. I’d noticed the statement on Wikipedia, looked for a clip, found nothing, and made what was, at that point, an idle query; I hadn’t yet gone down the rabbit hole. The question reached a small, limited cross-section of people, and it had been almost 25 years since the show aired; would anyone who watched it even remember doing so? Unsurprisingly, although some were familiar with it, nobody said they remembered the moment in the broadcast. Some good discussions came out of it, though, and a few people started digging, but nothing conclusive was found.

This was starting to bother me. I decided to look for contemporary evidence.

The posts on rec.games.video.sega painted a clear picture: on the day of the awards, Sega fans across America tuned into MTV expectantly. But they were surprised to see that Ulala was a no-show; she didn’t present the Best Dance Video award, or make any appearance at all.

The next day, some logged on to voice their disappointment.⁴

Subject: MTV’s VMA - Where was Ulala?

From: CORN__
It’s weird… She wasn’t there and no one’s talked about it.. She *was* supposed to be presenting Best Dance Video, right?

From: Scummy
I watched the whole thing with no sound at a club, so I don’t know what was said here and there, but I was mainly looking for Ulala too. Anyone know what’s the deal?

From: Azel
I have no idea what happened, Mabye sega didnt get the tape in the mail on time. But I did read Ulala was supposed to make several appearances at the award show, Oh well

It’s easy to see her non-appearance for ourselves. The 2000 VMAs are on YouTube⁵, and there’s no sign of Ulala. Instead, the Best Dance Video award was presented by two human celebrities, one of which — with 2025 hindsight — was a much bigger pull than the other... 

So, here’s where we stand: Ulala didn’t present the award. On off-air recordings of the event, she’s nowhere to be found... not even in the ad breaks. For some reason — some last minute change, perhaps — a thing that was supposed to happen didn’t happen. Pretty conclusive, right?

Not so fast. Let’s look at that other citation on Wikipedia. It’s a link to an IGN interview with Peter Moore, then president of Sega of America, speaking three months after the VMAs. And he seemingly talked about it having happened.

You know, it's funny because MTV was here the other day, and we were looking at Ulala - we did a massive promo with them where Ulala actually introduced the best dance video at the Video Music Awards - and as I was fond of saying, we threw everything and the kitchen sink at Space Channel 5.⁶

So, to recap, it appears that we now have:

• coverage from the games press saying it will happen
• newsgroup posts and video of the event showing that it didn't
• and an interview with a Sega executive saying it did.

What — and I cannot stress this enough — the hell?

Is it possible that Ulala made an appearance as advertised, but it didn’t make the TV edit? Was Peter Moore’s quote a truly audacious attempt at gaslighting the audience? Or is there some other explanation for these seemingly irreconcilable facts?

In fact, there is! But I wasn’t the one to spot it. The credit for that goes to Kate Willaert, one of the best game history researchers in a crowded field. In Sega’s original press release, she was perceptive enough to notice something I’d entirely missed.

Here's the press release in full; it contains the key to the whole puzzle. See if you can spot it.

Sega SPONSORS MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS;
Gaming COMPANY TO INTRODUCE SEGANET
and new ad campaign TO 22 MILLION VIEWERS

Sega of America today announced their second consecutive commitment to be a title sponsor for the MTV Video Music Awards and will launch a new ad campaign to support SegaNet, the only high-speed online gaming network and ISP service. The VMAs, which air live on September 7, 2000, will mark Sega’s kick-off multi-million marketing and advertising campaign to support this unprecedented online gaming service. In addition, Ulala, the dancing sensation from the hit Sega game “Space Channel 5”, will be presenting the best dance video category in 50 spots that will air from now until September 7, 2000.

“We introduced Dreamcast last year during the VMAs, which became the most successful product launch in entertainment retail history,” says Joe Culley, vice president of marketing for Sega of America. “This year we’ll use this show to introduce an audience of 22 million to SegaNet, a gaming network that is going to redefine the industry. We’re delivering on our promise to take video gaming to the next level, which is through online game play.”

The SegaNet advertising campaign is designed to appeal to the competitive nature of gamers who can now play opponents across the street or across the country through the Internet. Sega will debut one 60-second spot and two 30-second spots during the broadcast. In addition, Ulala, the dancing sensation from the popular Sega game “Space Channel 5” will promote the show by introducing the best dance video category in 50 spots featuring “Gomi’s Lair Remix”, the hit single from the Tommy Boy Silver Label: Space Channel 5 Mexican Flyer CD.

These promotions will air from now until September 7. Since the release of “Space Channel 5” in June, this super-sexy alien crime fighter has graced hundreds of magazine pages and airwaves.

The “2000 MTV Video Music Awards” will feature performances from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, DMX, Blink 182, Janet Jackson, N*SYNC, Eminem, Britney Spears and Rage Against the Machine. Hosted by the Wayans brothers, Shawn and Marlon, the “2000 MTV Video Music Awards” will broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in New York City on Thursday, September 7 at 8:00PM (ET).⁷

The announcement doesn’t say anything about Ulala presenting an award at the ceremony; it says she will be presenting the category in a promotion, running in ad breaks in the two weeks leading up to the show.^{footnote 1}

In addition, Ulala, the dancing sensation from the hit Sega game “Space Channel 5”, will be presenting the best dance video category in 50 spots that will air from now until September 7, 2000.

This detail is easy to miss without a close read, and that’s exactly what happened. That led to misreporting, and that led to expectations from Sega fans, and disappointment when reality didn't meet them.

And Peter Moore? He didn’t say Ulala presented the award; we just parsed it that way because we were primed to. His statement, though imprecise, was entirely consistent with what happened: starring in an MTV ad campaign.

we did a massive promo with them where Ulala actually introduced the best dance video at the Video Music Awards

So, there were mentions in established online and print media, and a quote from the president of Sega of America, seemingly acknowledging that it had happened. From these reputable sources, it made its way into Wikipedia as a well-sourced assertion with multiple citations; the system working as intended. And once there, it assumed the status of accepted fact. The statement can now be found in so many places that it’s self-perpetuating and likely ineradicable; I don’t expect any corrective effort can make a meaningful difference to its spread.

Today, we live in an age of deliberate misinformation; dishonest people using their social reach to push stories they know to be untrue in order to manipulate opinion and advance their own interests.

But this isn't that. Nobody in this story — neither Sega's press office, nor the Gamespot or IGN staff writers, nor Peter Moore, nor Wikipedia’s editors — set out to create a myth. It’s a demonstration of how bad faith isn’t a requirement for the genesis of misinformation. Sometimes it happens when everyone means well.

There's a valuable lesson in this for all of us, I think: if good intentions are insufficient insurance against becoming a source of misinformation, then it's on each of us to be extremely careful about the veracity of the information we put out into the world.

Incidentally, I note with admiration that an uncredited writer for Games™ magazine, back in 2013, was among the few to get the facts straight:

Despite the short lifespan of the series, Ulala proved to be a very popular videogame character at the time, famously voiced in the Western release by singer Apollo Smile. She appeared in promo videos for the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, and almost earned her own animated TV show — also on MTV — but it stalled in the planning stages.⁸

But broadly speaking, this narrative has gone almost unchallenged for the last quarter-century. It’s a well-circulated, and seemingly well-substantiated, part of Sega history. But it’s false. Not only did Ulala never present a VMA, she was never supposed to.

Nevertheless, there's also a truth here: Ulala did appear on promos for the awards. These promos would be hard evidence we could point to in any attempt to correct the record. I've looked through all the off-air MTV recordings from August or September 2000 I can see on YouTube or the Internet Archive, but haven't found a copy. For the moment at least, those promos seem to be lost media.

But with fifty airings, it’s possible — even likely — that somebody taped one at the time, and it’s possible that that VHS tape still exists. And it’s possible that such a tape will one day be digitised, and the Ulala spot will finally get out there, giving us closure on a 25-year-old case of crossed wires.

Footnotes

1. The promos for the VMAs that year were short skits, featuring different celebrities, each for a single category of the awards. No idea if there was one for every category, but here's one (maybe the only?) surviving example. Based on this, it's likely that the Ulala spot was also 30 seconds long.

References

1. Space Channel 5's Ulala to Present at MTV Video Music Awards. IGN, 12/08/2000.
2. Ulala Becomes a Presenter. GameSpot. Erroneously listed as 17/05/2006 in their CMS, but certainly originally published in August or September 2000.
3. Ulala (Space Channel 5). Wikipedia. Permanent link to current revision as of time of writing.
4. MTV's VMA - Where was Ulala? rec.games.video.sega, 09/09/2000.
5. 2000 MTV Video Music Awards (September 7, 2000) (Original Version). Uploaded by Malik Silas Jefferson, 16/03/2024.
6. An Interview with SEGA of America President, Peter Moore. IGN, 23/12/2000.
7. Press release buried in this long page; search for 'mtv video'. dvd-fever.co.uk, 25/08/2000.
8. GamesTM, issue 133, March 2013.