Originally published at: Friday Night Videos is a blast from the past - Boing Boing
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I remember there was a show on PBS, I want to say on Sundays, that had music videos. As someone who only had access to 4 channels, it was a treat. I remember some of them - like My Baby Wrote Me a Letter - clearly an older song, but it has a video to it that seemed modern and trying to tell a story… I am not sure what it was actually from and a quick search on youtube I don’t see it.
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I think we grew up very near each other and around the same time (early 80s NW MO), but despite being poor and very rural, I had one exceptional blessing going for me; we lived next to the radio station where the local cable satellite was mounted. My dad knew the cable company guy and he offered to run a line to our house for free(!!!). Of course, TV technology being what it was at the time, we were limited to 13 channels, but oh my god, two of them were MTV and Nickelodeon (you could also “tune” ch 13 to HBO, but it was scrambled and fuzzy). It was like a portal into a completely different, non-crazy, non-evangelical world that was all secretly mine. A little while later we also got the Disney channel, which at the time was basically just all the old shorts and feature films and a bunch of Disney Parks features. It was glorious.
I’m still shocked that dad was willing to shell out the ca $35/mo for cable, but damn it was amazing.
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I had friends and relatives that had cable and VCRs, but my parents weren’t really into that. They still don’t have anything other than antenna TV, but they do have access to Netflix now.
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Ah, yes, FNV, which would interrupt the videos to tell you what videos were next!
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Friday Night Videos was a weekly dose of music videos for those without cable and, therefore, no MTV.
Also for those of us without any kind of social life on a Friday evening.
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by the time I was staying up late enough to watch FNV, it was hosted by – for some reason – 50+ year old Frankie Crocker and a dorky comedian named Tom Kenney who later voiced some cartoon character with the unlikely name of (checks notes) SpongeBob SquarePants?
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Could that have been “Alive From Off Center” ?
I remember looking forward to watching that on PBS back in the day.
As for Friday Night Videos, I’d completely forgotten “The Curly Shuffle”
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There was also a daily (well, weekday) dose on MV3. It wasn’t straight-up videos, though - sometimes they’d intercut the videos with the audience dancing, or they’d have an interview (e.g.The Bangles, not long after they had to change their name from The Bangs). But it’s the first time I’d ever heard of Peter Gabriel - they played the “Shock the Monkey” video. That was (for me) during 7th grade - right before 8th grade started, cable arrived in our neighborhood & we signed up. With MTV on any time we wanted, I didn’t really know about FNV until I started watching Letterman a couple of years later, & noticed that (at the time) his show didn’t air on Fridays & FNV came on instead.
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I recently got Night Flight Plus streaming. It features original episodes of the show, sometimes with original commercials.
Also a ton of quirky movies. Night Flight was an arty music video show. Giving an overall theme of the videos shown. Usually followed by shorts or a cult classic film.
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No it would have been like early to mid 80s. I remember basically it started out like a juke box playing a record and then it would play a video. There was no commentary or introductions. It may have even been locally produced or something.
I remember that had some radio play and play within my schools music classes (as mentioned elsewhere, often involved pop music). But it was a staple at the roller rink, and the handful of times I went there, it was always played.
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That sounds like Video Jukebox, between movies on HBO.
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loved, loved Night Flight.
Pump It Up with Dee Barnes was a syndicated hip hop video show that gave me a lifeline to culture without cable and Yo! MTV Raps. in Detroit Metro, we had a hip hop radio station and just generally a presence with my peers. after moving to Nashville, hip hop fucking vanished. without Pump It Up, I wouldn’t have seen De La and KRS-ONE, to name two just off the top of my head
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I mean it couldn’t be, I didn’t have access to HBO. Granted this was like what - Jesus like 40+ years ago??? I could be misremembering things. But it was PBS. There as nothing flashy. It has like a short intro, and then played videos for like 25ish min I think. Stuff like Lauper’s Time after Time, Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching me (that was a little spoopy), Men at Works’ Dr Heckyll and Mr Jive. And like I said the odd video of The Letter, an older song I knew from listening to the oldies station, but it was a modern video. Like they shot a new video to get some air play (unless there was some sort of cover of it.)
But man, memory is funny - there are clips and jokes from years ago that stick in your head for some reason.
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My friends and I all tuned in for Letterman’s first Friday show which he made a very big deal of with a special logo that said “The Friday Edition”. But, if I’m remembering correctly, Friday Night Videos was simply moved back in the schedule and aired after Letterman.
I could be thinking of something else but there was a music video show after Letterman and one night it was hosted by Chris Elliott. Letterman brought it up a couple of times calling it something like “the little music video show for the kids”. Then Elliott came out to talk about how he’d be hosting it. Letterman asked him what was preceding it and Elliott said, “Oh, some lousy, immature show that’ll put the kids to sleep so the adults can enjoy the music videos in peace.”
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They did that (sort of)* for “Love Me Two Times” when Alive, She Cried came out (not the version from Strange Days, which I didnt hear until later). Nickelodeon (of all channels) played that video in between shows, more than a few times, & that was when I paid closer attention to The Doors.
*They didn’t shoot a video so much as assemble some archival footage, interspersed with still photos. I can’t find that video on YT. MTV showed a similar video (about a year later) for “Are You Experienced?” when Kiss the Sky was released (also around the same time Devo’s version came out).
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Great post!
I was such a fan of the opening sequence!
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