Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been able to work with so many talented people in my time on Earth, but the once-in-a-lifetime experiences that involved the Earth and the Moon and my amazing colleagues in television at MTV have to be among the best. This post is about two animated spots produced during MTV’s first year.
One was the most popular, the very first time the world saw the visualization of our mutating logo that would lead an unsuspecting global populace to all the other atrocities we were about to unleash.
The other was only played once, and not on television.
“One Small Step” from fredseibert on Vimeo.
There were very few “ideas” for spots I could claim as mine at MTV: Music Television. Identifying talent and strategy were my strengths, and I felt from there everything else would flow. But this spot was different; it’s the one for which I feel complete ownership.
Bob Pittman knew there had to be a signal identification at the top and bottom of each and every hour of MTV, where a VJ would identify the most important music videos in that half hour. We agreed it would be a voice over animation, with stills IDing the songs.
But, what should the animation be? It had to be memorable, repeatable, and not drive a viewer completely crazy. After all, it was going to play almost 17,000 times every year. If we did it right, my biggest goal could be achieved; I wanted to world to fall in love with our ‘M.’
Oh. And we had only 90 days until launch.
It seemed to me MTV had the most stuck up and conceited view of ourselves. We were completely enamored of the fact that we had no TV shows on our TV networks (a new “show” every three minutes, when a new video started). That was world changing, right? (Well, not really. CNN beat us to it by 14 months. But, they didn’t “name it and claim it;” MTV did, so MTV would get the credit.)
This spot was going to be our most important. There would be over 30 changing video pieces every hour (music videos, promos, VJs, and commercials) and this would be the only thing all day that was constant. It would get a lot of scrutiny. So, I thought the “top of the hour” spot should do its practical job and reflect our arrogant self regard. And not for nothing, it needed to be inexpensive, and use our ever changing logo that Manhattan Design brought us. (At least the constant logo metamorphosis –fractions of a second for each design– would keep us fresh, distinct, and force folks to watch that ‘M.’)
Of course, it goes without saying that like everything we would do, it had to have that indefinable rock’n’roll attitude.
The simplest way to combine all that stuff was to steal the shine from an already existing piece of video. “Let’s take the most famous television scene ever,” said I, and fold, spindle, and mutilate it to our nefarious purposes.
Our brainstorming in my tiny cubicle turned up some famous, or really infamous, stuff. We were all children of the 60s and 70s, so our immediate thought was the day in 1963 when everyone stayed home from school and were subjected to the live video horror of the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting by Jack Ruby. Aside from its total wrongness, it occurred to me that it was pretty much an American memory.
I mean, please. The very first claim MTV was going to make, our first promise, was a promise we really had to own.
“The world’s first video music channel. MTV: Music Television.”
MTV needed a global moment. Or maybe 75,000 of them.
As our team was bullshitting ideas it came to me. In the summer of ‘69 I was traveling behind the Iron Curtain with my family on the day of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. The streets of dirt poor Sofia, Bulgaria were choked with walkers looking for apartments with scarce black & white TV sets to witness this seemingly impossible achievement of man. Truly, Earth’s most memorable event in TV history.
My mentor Dale Pon had introduced me to the treasure trove of free images and film from NASA, a public government entity which we all “owned” as US citizens. It would be an inexpensive source of public domain video for us. As a start-up –no one was really sure this thing would work except us– we needed all the financial short-cuts we could find.
“Space is very rock'n'roll,” said senior producer Marcy Brafman, when the NASA imagery was suggested. Not the first or last time she’d hit the nail on the head.
Let’s cop it, I figured. The worst that could happen is that a generation of kids would grow up wondering why NASA photoshopped in an American flag with MTV’s used to be. There was that attitude we needed.
My long time creative partner and couldn’t-be-closer-friend Alan Goodman and I enlisted Buzz Potamkin’s Perpetual Motion Pictures (soon to be Buzzco) to put together the spot. David Sameth produced for Buzz, Candy Kugel illustrated and directed (with some of the logos adapted from absolutely original illustrations by Manhattan Design’s Frank Olinsky), and the guitar blast track (we thought it had the oomph of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”) was by John Petersen and Jonathan Elias at Elias/Peterson.
By the way, the original version of the spot embedded here never ran. A few days before launch the lawyers informed me that we needed –and would never receive!– permission from astronaut Neil Armstrong to use his quotation. We rushed to make a change, and then 24 hours later –or launch night only on midnight, August 1, 1981– one of the big bosses asked to do a personal voice over. John Lack, the executive vice president of our parent, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, who’s idea had been the seed from which MTV grew, announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, rock'n'roll.” John, a huge music fan was proud of his role in jump starting this phase of the evolution. And from 1 a.m. until the very end, the rocket blast sounded with only a 'beep beep beep’ in place of John and Mr. Armstrong.
The VMA Moonman
The spot ran at the top of every hour, more than 75,000 times each year (48 times each day, including its shorter variation at the 30 minute mark). Nowadays, the only sense memory/DNA that’s left of it is the “Moonman” award from the VMAs (the idea of Manhattan Design’s Frank Olinsky, I believe); no one in the audience knows why it exists. The spot itself had to be retired, tragically, on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger Shuttle exploded in mid-air. The end of the first space era in history.
…..
Recently, Alan added some details I had completely forgotten:
This is great! My memory is a little different on some of the details.
There is no question that the man on the moon was an audacious act of appropriation and historical vandalism, and an inexpensive use of our national archive of free images. But as I recall, it was just one in a sack of animated IDs we commissioned. It was, as originally designed, 10 seconds long because all our animations were ten seconds long. In fact, the bottom of the hour spot we used forever was that original 10 second piece.
As I tell the story, the Top of the Hour was something we learned about very late in the process – long after many if not all of the animated IDs we ordered for the launch were delivered. We understood instantly the need – it’s just that no one had asked us to make one, we had spent all our budget for animation, and we were weeks away from launch. We looked at all the the spots we had created and realized all but one of them worked only as the ten second pieces they were designed to be. But since the logos inside Neil Armstrong’s flag were essentially on a loop, we could just keep recycling the logos inside the flag. It was the only way to make a :30 second piece out of one of our tens. By default, it became our choice.
[Fred: Candy Kugel reminded me that the animation was done in one week!]
Same thing with the music from Elias/Peterson. We had commissioned five pieces of music we owned that we made available to any of the animators working for us. Again, only one of those pieces could be looped. The “Duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh” was something I could go into an audio studio and re-edit. We did three slightly different mixes and built it into a coherent piece of music 30 seconds long. There was not one single other choice.
The Top of the Hour was a case of happy accident! The man on the moon became an important icon for us, and lives on in the Video Music Award. But who’s to say what it all might have been if we had actually planned it all!
“Freddie Buys It” from fredseibert on Vimeo.
The never-on-TV spot story is shorter. A couple of months after the network launch, Bob promoted me to Vice President, MTV’s first (a big deal in those pre-title inflationary days); I was probably whining too much about how hard I was working. He put together a huge congratulatory event and asked Alan to make some video just for the party. Alan worked with director Steve Oakes and producer Peter Rosenthal at Broadcast Arts in Washington DC to modify one of the awesome claymation spots they’d made for us. They put a plasticine me in the spot and ignobly ran me over. I got what I deserved.
Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.
My promotion party, October 1981. That’s my boss, Bob Pittman, to my right.
Credits:
Video:
Title: MTV: Music Television: One Small Step
Logo: Manhattan Design: Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky, Patti Rogoff
Animation: Buzzco/Perpetual Motion Pictures
Director: Candy Kugel
Producer: David Sameth
Executive Producer: Buzz Potamkin
Music: Jonathan Elias & Jon Peterson, EP: Scott Elias, Elias/Peterson Associates, New York
Creative Directors for MTV: Fred Seibert & Alan Goodman
Photo by Pat Gorman, courtesy of John Sykes.