Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/01/watch-a-slew-of-vintage-mtv-fr.html
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Sure, maybe that’s the channel’s finest era, but MTV’s finest program was (and will always be) Daria.
Despite that, I’m still enjoying the VHS-ified music videos!
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Why does my cat keep walking into the screen?
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That intro… with the countdown and launch and then into the Buggles. Oh man, I need a cigarette.
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well, there’s four hours from MY weekend planned.
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This is incredible! Playing full screen on my Samsung and I’m 11 again.
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Words to warm my grumpy old heart: “I’m Martha Quinn…”
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Nostalgia, for gen X, in the time of corona. Are we just trying to earn our okay boomer position now? Because this is how we earn it.
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We can start comparing 1981 programmes with 2020 ones. And I am not talking about music quality or genres but the fact that MTV is not transmitting music videos, and even the more musc oriented spinoff VH1 is putting some sitcoms.
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If genuinely enjoying something earns me an ”ok boomer” then screw whoever says it I’m gonna go ahead and enjoy myself.
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Just the after the 3:00:00 mark: “Music, that’s what we’re about. Not iPhones… yet.”
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MTV in 2020 is to MTV in 1981 as CNN in 2020 is to CNN in 1981.
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I’m with @dculberson on this one. This boomer is planning a dance party later!
When MTV started, I sat my baby daughter in front of the screen & said “Remember this! It’s history!” And I picked her up and sang and danced to The Buggles. She doesn’t really remember, of course, but she’ll tell people that her earliest memory is watching MTV come on the air!
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I’d be curious to know when MTV last played a music video solely for its own sake.
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“There’s nothing new under the sun,” and “everything old is new again.”
Trippy… I was five years old on the day Mtv launched; it literally is one of my earliest memories.
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I’ve had these running on the big screen all day today, and it’s made me feel the best I’ve felt in a month. And my gawd, some of those early 80s commercials!
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It’s remarkable how the channel has evolved (?) from its pioneering earliest days filled with new music, youth culture, and visual experimentalism to its current form.
As a biologist, I need to stress that evolution doesn’t imply getting better by an objective criterion. I too prefer the days when MTV was a music video jukebox, but that probably wasn’t particularly adaptive (that is, profitable) long term.
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But what I’m not quite understanding is where did things like “Video Killed the Radio Star” air before MTV? The video is a classic, but implies a situation where it had already been established that the new age of video meant you couldn’t just sing well, but had to look good doing it. It seems like something that would have come out a year or so after MTV started, but no, it is literally the first video.
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I always took it more to mean that TV supplanted radio as the mass medium of choice. I never knew it was literally the first video shown on MTV, or if I had I’d forgotten! But the song was a hit on FM radio, so it make sense as a choice of which video to run first.
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