"You Might Think" is a 1984 single by the Cars from their fifth studio album, Heartbeat City. The track was written by Ric Ocasek and produced by Mutt Lange and the Cars. Ocasek sang lead vocals. The track was the first single to be released from Heartbeat City. "You Might Think" peaked at No. 7 in the U.S. and No. 8 in Canada. It also peaked at No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the U.S., the first song by the band to do so. In the UK, the song reached No. 88 on the pop charts.
Music video
The music video is one of the first to use computer graphics. The video features band leader Ric Ocasek and model Susan Gallagher in a series of quirky encounters. Ocasek appears in her bathroom mirror, inside a large periscope that pops up in her bathtub, in her mouth, as a fly, as King Kongon top of the Empire State Building and as the Robot Monster, among other incarnations. The rest of the band appears together and separately throughout the video; after they all appear in the movie-theater scene, keyboardist Greg Hawkes plays the dentist in the scene in which Ocasek is jackhammering a tooth in the girl's mouth. In the King Kong scene, the other three members, guitarists Elliot Easton and Benjamin Orr and drummer David Robinson, are paired off in the two planes flying around Ocasek. "You Might Think" won the first MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year and was nominated for five more awards at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards. The video also won five awards at Billboard's 1984 Video Music Awards and four awards at the Videotape Production Association's 1985 Monitor Awards. Robin Sloane of Elektra Records creative directed the video after director Jeff Stein showed her samples from New-York-based visual-effects company Charlex. The firm was nationally known for the innovative weekly advertisements that it was producing the National Enquirer. The commercials featured the first use of the Quantel Paintbox, the first tool for artists to use directly on the video screen. Stein, along with Charlex founders Alex Weil and Charlie Levi, directed and produced the video. Danny Rosenberg and Bill Weber served both as editors and video engineers, Kevin Jones was the lighting director, Danny Ducovny the cinematographer and Bob Ryzner the art director. The video cost $80,000 to produce, which was almost triple the average music-video budget of the time.
