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Little Red Corvette is a Prince video released for broadcast and to promote the single.
Directed by Bryan (aka Brian) Greenberg, this video was shot during the final week of rehearsals for the 1983 leg of the 1999 Tour at the Civic Center, Lakeland, Florida.
Additional scenes were planned for the video beside the performance. Greenberg discussed the shooting in 2017: "We were going to shoot (other scenes) the next day. It was actually a night shoot. It was him and Vanity rolling around in a red Corvette that was going to be towed around this little lake. It was really beautiful, a really pretty area we were filming around where we were shooting. But, at the time, Prince hadn’t done anything outside of being onstage. And he’s very shy. He really keeps to himself. So I always knew in the back of my head that I just don’t think he’s going to do this. He wouldn’t have control. He wouldn’t be able to control the situation. At the end of the day (after shooting the stage performance), Prince looked at me and I looked at him and it was like, ‘You know, we’ve got the video. We don’t need to do any more. This will work.’ And we both kind of decided we had the video.".
Little Red Corvette is one of the first videos by African-American artists to be played regularly on MTV (with Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean). This exposure of the song helped Prince to reach the Billboard’s Top Ten for the first time. It also expanded his audience enormously and crossed him over to a large white audience. During the 1999 Tour, The Time’s Monte Moir noted that audiences were "90 per cent black until Little Red Corvette came out. All of a sudden it shifted, drastically. It got to be half and half, if not 60-40 white."
The video was included on The Hits Collection in 1993.
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