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Those horns kick in, and we’re transported into breathtaking music-video territory. Stop-motion animation was the name of this new game, with Peter Gabriel allowing himself to lie under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming “Sledgehammer” one frame at a time. Director Stephen R. Johnson is clearly having the time of his life, matching up lyrics to images — Gabriel sings about “a bumper car bumping,” and that’s what happens to our hapless star. It’s one of MTV’s most important videos ever: not only did it win nine Video Music Awards in 1987 (a feat still unsurpassed); it’s also the most played clip in the history of the channel. As for the people who provided the claymation, pixelation and stop-motion animation — they were called Aardman Animations. What became of them? They would go on to make a certain Oscar-winning series of shorts about Wallace and Gromit.