We want our MTV!

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode: "We Want Our MTV!"

Release Date: October 14, 2025
Hosts: Josh & Chuck (featuring producer Jerry)
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

This episode of Stuff You Should Know dives deep into the history, impact, and legacy of MTV (Music Television)—the iconic cable network that revolutionized music, youth culture, and television itself starting in the early 1980s. Hosts Josh and Chuck reminisce about their own formative experiences as “MTV generation babies,” trace the channel’s innovative origins, explore its lasting cultural effects (both positive and negative), and discuss how it shaped the business and artistry of music videos, launched careers, and eventually evolved beyond its musical roots. Throughout, the discussion is full of nostalgia, wit, and playful banter, packed with little-known facts and memorable stories.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nostalgic Beginnings: The MTV Generation

• The hosts immediately set the tone with a mutual sense of nostalgia:
  • Air-guitaring the MTV theme and recalling the image of Neil Armstrong planting the MTV flag on the moon.
  • “That’s—I'll be able to do that with my dying breath. It's so ingrained.” (Josh, 01:36)

2. Early History: Pre-MTV and the Rise of Music Videos

• Music videos weren’t invented by MTV; earlier examples included Cab Calloway’s "Minnie the Moocher" (1930s), The Beatles' promotional films, and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975).
  • “The Beatles are who people usually point to as kind of starting out the music video thing.” (Chuck, 03:22)
• The story of MTV runs parallel to the rise of cable television (from 10 million subscribers in 1975 to 40 million in 1985), opening doors to niche channels.

3. Founding MTV: Key Players and Decisions

• Bob Pittman: Often considered MTV’s founder. Also iHeartMedia’s CEO; the hosts meet him later in life (Chuck shares a personal story, 10:10).

• Mike Nesmith (of The Monkees): Created "PopClips," a proto-MTV show; didn’t join MTV but sold them the concept.

• John Lack & Nickelodeon: Experimentation with cable led to the idea for a music channel, initially almost called TVM, then MTV.

• “They need the logo, they need the theme song... So they brought in, again, teams of friends to do this stuff.” (Chuck, 11:25)

4. MTV's Iconic Branding

• Logo designed by Frank Olinsky. Almost unchanged since inception:
  • “Very few logos are more recognizable than MTV... he just nailed it.” (Josh, 11:50)
• The theme riff was based on The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”
• The famous "moon man" intro and branding referenced the moon landing for cultural significance but—practically—used public domain NASA footage.
  • “If the US Government owns something... You own it too.” (Josh, 13:20)

Notable Quote:

• On the original launch:
  • “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” (John Lack as the voice, replacing Neil Armstrong, 14:01)

5. MTV's Launch and First Videos

• Official debut: August 1, 1981, just after midnight, but viewable only in parts of New Jersey.
• First video played: The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star".
  • “Everybody knows that Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video played on MTV. What was the second?” (Chuck, 18:23)
  • Second video: Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run.”
• Heavy rotation due to a very limited initial video library (250 videos). Rod Stewart was most prominent on Day 1.

6. The VJs: Iconic Personalities

• First VJ team: JJ Jackson, Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, Mark Goodman.
  • Each cast for an archetype (the “old guy,” “girl next door,” “hunky Italian,” etc.).
  • “He wanted very specific archetypes...” (Chuck, 20:13)
• Notables rejected: Richard Belzer and Carol Leifer.

Notable Quote:

• “If your parents didn't want you watching it, you definitely wanted to watch mtv.” (Josh, 25:26)

7. Cultural Impact: Marketing, Perception, and Expansion

• The “I want my MTV” ad campaign encouraged viewers to demand cable providers carry MTV.
• The presence (or banning) of MTV in conservative areas only grew its cultural cachet among teens (25:26).

8. The Power of the Music Video and Early Innovations

• Music videos weren’t just ads—they became mini-movies, sometimes avant-garde (“Hungry Like the Wolf," "Sledgehammer," "Take on Me").
  • “It became clear that where MTV played a song... Those records were going to sell in local record stores.” (Josh, 30:04)
• Some artists, like Devo, Talking Heads, and Art of Noise, gained huge popularity via MTV even if they wouldn’t have found big radio audiences.

9. Race, Representation, and The Michael Jackson Effect

• Early MTV largely excluded Black artists.
  • David Bowie confronted Mark Goodman about it on air.
  • Walter Yetnikoff (of CBS) forced MTV’s hand, threatening to pull all CBS videos if they didn’t play Michael Jackson.
  • “He said, if you don't start playing these singles, these videos off Michael Jackson's Thriller album, we're pulling all of CBS Records artists... ‘We will publicly accuse you of racism.’” (Chuck, 38:44)
• "Thriller" (1982) and its $900,000 video budget, directed by John Landis, became a watershed moment (34:02–37:21).

Notable Quote:

• “It was a $900,000 budget for that video... part of the funding came from Josh's parents because they ended up selling the making of on VHS.” (Chuck, 36:48)

10. Breakout Artists & Videos that Defined the Era

• MTV made stars out of Madonna, Billy Joel, and especially artists with compelling videos—not just good songs.
  • Groundbreaking directors like David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Steven R. Johnson.
  • Notorious and iconic videos: “Freedom! ‘90,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Sledgehammer,” “Take On Me,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “Hungry Like the Wolf.”
• Parody and alternative: Weird Al's “ALTV,” the cult “Fish Heads” video, and Duran Duran’s cinematic output.
• Artists like ZZ Top gained new audiences (across demographics) through creative videos.

11. Innovations in Programming: Beyond Videos

• Specialized shows launched mid-80s onward (52:06):
  • 120 Minutes (alt/indie), Headbangers Ball (metal), Yo! MTV Raps (hip hop), Club MTV, MTV Unplugged (acoustic performances).
    • “Yo! MTV Raps cannot be underestimated... in bringing hip hop and rap to the mainstream.” (Chuck, 52:57)
  • “Unplugged” became a critical/commercial hit for acts like Nirvana, Oasis, REM, and Neil Young.

Notable Trivia:

• First video on "Yo! MTV Raps": Shinehead’s “Chain Gang” (53:15)

12. Spring Break, MTV News, and Non-Musical Offerings

• MTV Spring Break coverage and spin-off “Beach House” shows became part of American summer (55:46).
• MTV News (“MTV News... You hear it first!”) with Kurt Loder, Chris Connelly, Tabitha Soren, Serena Altschul, Kennedy, Duffy, Daisy Fuentes, etc.
• First successful non-music show: Remote Control (comedy game show).
  • “It was set in Ken Ober’s parents' basement and all the players played from recliners…” (Josh, 58:04)
• Additional notable series: House of Style, The Ben Stiller Show, The State (sketch), Liquid Television (animation/experimental—home to Aeon Flux, Beavis & Butt-Head, Daria).
  • “Ten years at least before Adult Swim... this crazy, weird, experimental animation on television.” (Chuck, 61:25)

13. The Birth and Impact of Reality TV

• The Real World (1992) launched the “reality wave,” fundamentally changing TV in the U.S.
  • “Jackass,” “Cribs,” “Osbournes,” “Jersey Shore,” “Punk’d,” “TRL/Total Request Live” with Carson Daly.
  • “You can trace every problem we have with the world today back to reality TV and ergo, back to The Real World.” (Josh, 63:24)

14. MTV’s Decline & Shift from Music

• As channel surfing increased and the video library broadened, Viacom (MTV’s parent) pivoted to longer, narrative-style programming to reduce viewer drop-off.
  • This led to less music, more shows.
  • “It just became sensible for them to get away from music. But... ‘If you still want music videos, don't worry, MTV2 will have you covered.’” (Josh, 66:04)
  • MTV2 (1996): originally all-music, but also shifted away from videos.
  • The arrival of YouTube (2005–on) made on-demand video access universal and sealed the move away from “music television.”

15. Modern MTV: Surviving on ‘Ridiculousness’

• The show “Ridiculousness” (viral clips with a comedic lens) now dominates MTV’s lineup, propping up the network with an enormous episode count (season 45 in 2025).

16. Infamous MTV Contests

• Competing with ever-escalating prizes: win Bon Jovi’s house, party with Van Halen (yes, with very debauched results), etc.
  • “There’s no way you could do that stuff these days.” (Chuck, 69:38)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “I’ll be able to do that [the MTV riff] with my dying breath. It’s so ingrained in my head.” (Josh, 01:36)
• “The rise of cable... from 10 million in 1975 to 40 million in 1985, that was really what grew MTV.” (Chuck, 05:13)
• “There were a lot of interesting pioneering groups that were making videos even before MTV came along that MTV digested and fed itself on and grew big on. And then they just got left...” (Josh, 27:02)
• “If your parents didn’t want you watching it, you definitely wanted to watch mtv.” (Josh, 25:30)
• “He said, if you don't start playing these singles... we're pulling all CBS Records artists... we will publicly accuse you of racism.” (Chuck, 38:44)
• “MTV provided a bardic function for American teenagers... you were seeing, as all your friends were, what was cool that week.” (Josh, 44:33)
• “It just became sensible... to get away from music. But... ‘If you still want music videos, don't worry, MTV2 will have you covered.’” (Josh, 66:04)
• “Ridiculousness... it's been on for 14 years, since 2011, yet somehow is in season 45.” (Josh, 67:56)
• “There's no way you could do that stuff these days, obviously, but they had a bunch of those [contests].” (Chuck, 69:38)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Nostalgic opening & MTV’s first moments – 01:13–05:50
• Music videos before MTV; cable TV context – 02:25–05:50
• Founding stories: Pittman, Nesmith, etc. – 05:50–10:00
• Logo, Moon Man, branding – 11:25–14:33
• MTV’s launch & first day – 16:56–19:29
• Early VJs, casting archetypes, rejections – 20:13–23:01
• “I want my MTV” campaign, market expansion – 23:56–25:55
• Michael Jackson, Bowie confrontation, race – 34:02–39:17
• Transformative artists, videos, techniques – 40:00–48:47
• Programming: 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Unplugged, Spring Break, MTV News – 51:20–56:54
• Non-music shows: Remote Control, House of Style, sketch and animation, Liquid TV, Beavis & Butthead, Daria – 57:13–62:35
• Reality TV, the Real World, TRL – 62:32–65:04
• MTV’s decline, transition to non-music TV, MTV2, impact of YouTube – 65:04–66:45
• Modern MTV: Ridiculousness, long-run and contests – 67:00–70:19

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Final Thoughts

Josh and Chuck’s affectionate and wide-ranging tour through MTV’s meteoric rise, cultural dominance, woes, and ongoing legacy is a testament to just how much the channel shaped generations of music fans and TV viewers. They weave in personal stories, fun trivia, and unfiltered opinions, painting a robust picture of MTV’s lasting significance—and asking why and how a once-music-dedicated channel could change the world, then lose its place as technology and culture shifted once more.

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For more episodes or to follow up on the promised VH1 episode, check your podcast feed.

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Transcript

[Chuck]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Josh]

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[Chuck]

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[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just a few MTV generation babies hanging out talking about MTV on this MTV episode of Stuff youf Should Know about mtv.

[Chuck]

Dana, Dana, Dan. Dana. Da na na na na na.

[Josh]

That's. I'll be able to do that with my dying breath. It's so ingrained in my head. Yeah.

[Chuck]

I mean, how can you not picture Neil Armstrong jumping off onto that moon?

[Josh]

Yep.

[Chuck]

With an MTV flag for sure.

[Josh]

Like a multi changing MTV flag that's just drawn over the American flag. It's just iconic.

[Chuck]

Yeah. But hey people, the answers to who wrote that song and who came up with that idea, they're all in this jam packed episode about MTV where we are surely going to wax nostalgic.

[Josh]

I think it would be impossible not to.

[Chuck]

Impossible.

[Josh]

As a matter of fact, I challenge us to try not to be nostalgic in this episode.

[Chuck]

I've already ruined it. I just air guitar the MTV theme.

[Josh]

We'll exclude that.

[Chuck]

Okay.

[Josh]

So we're talking about mtv. I don't think there's many people out there who don't know what MTV is. It's a global juggernaut or it certainly was at one point in time. But for those who may not be familiar, MTV stood for Music Television. And it was what most people consider the first network dedicated to playing music videos. It's not true, but it's close enough that you might as well just say, fine, we'll go with that as the definition.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. And this was not the beginning of music videos. Music videos were. MTV did not create the music videos. They just were the first channel. Well, that's not even true either, so I'm just gonna shut up now. Some people point to the song chantilly lace from 1958 from the Big Bopper as maybe the first music video. Because it was not just a film of a band playing their song, but there was some performative theatrics to it.

[Josh]

I saw one earlier by 16 years with CAB Calloway doing Minnie the Moocher.

[Chuck]

Yeah, well, the Beatles are who people usually point to as kind of starting out the music video thing where they showed the band doing other things. And they were a little more elaborate and had different scenes. And you could see those on Top of the Pops on BBC or the Ed Sullivan Show. And then that Bohemian Rhapsody video from Queen from 1975 was one of the big ones. And they expressly did that so they didn't have to lip sync a performance on Top of the Pops.

[Josh]

And that's a full eight years before MTV came out. So that was like a definitive music video that they played on MTV for, like, decades to come. It was just a great video. But it also kicked off something really important that led to mtv, which was it became kind of standard in the recording industry to create a music video for maybe the top single or something of a big album that a big act was coming out with to use as a marketing or promotional tool. So apparently Queen kicked that off with the Bohemian Rhapsody video.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. There were some countries had like, you know, music video shows that would be on maybe late night or something on a weird station. New Zealand had a radio with pictures in 1976, little on the nose, the USA Network. And I do remember this. In 1978, they had a show called Video Concert Hall. Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. I didn't, like, sit there glued to it like I did MTV. Cause I was still just 7 years old. And I think it was a late night thing, but it was really, you know, the MTV story goes in lockstep with the story of cable television. By the way, big thanks to Olivia for this. And little hint, upcoming on Thursday, we're gonna Round it out with an episode on VH1.

[Josh]

What?

[Chuck]

Yes. You knew that?

[Josh]

For real?

[Chuck]

You didn't know that?

[Josh]

No.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I told you in an email. Let's do MTV and VH1 this week.

[Josh]

I must have missed that.

[Chuck]

All right, well, I'm glad we let. You're talking about mtv. We'd be in bad shape for real. But the rise of cable as like 10 million subscribers in 1975 to 40 million in 1985, that was really what grew. MTV was cable being a thing. And the U.S. government saying, hey, cable, it's a little looser. You can kind of do a little more. And then cable companies saying, hey, maybe we should start thinking about kind of different kinds of channels we've never had before.

[Josh]

Yeah. Because there were a lot more channels that the FCC opened up on the bandwidth where before it was just over the air channels, and those were full. So don't even ask. Shut up. The networks have those locked down. When cable opened, it was like, what do you want to do? You want to make a channel off for kids? Great. Let's found Pinwheel and then eventually call it Nickelodeon. You want to show reruns? We'll call it Nick at night. You want to show little kids, even smaller kids programs? Great. We'll make a channel called Nick Junior. What else do you want? And people said, we got enough Nickelodeon. Let's think of something else. And one of the other things that was thought of was something called the Movie Channel. And there was a guy named Bob Pittman who was working on it. And he happens to be the CEO of iHeartMedia who we work for. And he's one of the big players with the founding of mtv and is usually the person that people will tell you who know about this kind of thing. Who. If you ask him who founded mtv, the answer will usually be Bob Pittman. And that is true to an extent. But he wasn't alone. One of the other founders, who is sometimes called the architect of mtv, was already a very famous person by the time MTV came out.

[Chuck]

Uh, are you talking about Mike Nesmith?

[Josh]

I am.

[Chuck]

Okay. This was in 1975. Mike Nesmith of the TV show and the musical group the Monkees. He made a pilot called PopClips, which was backed by TV production Legend and juggernaut Norman Lear. And it was, you know, it was basically proto mtv. They had comedians introducing music videos, like promotional videos that these record companies were making.

[Josh]

Right.

[Chuck]

And there was a guy named John Lack. I don't think we mentioned that Time Warner Cable Corporation was One of the early cable companies that was. They launched Nickelodeon. They were kind of experimenting around. And in 1979, American Express bought half of that. And that new company John Lack worked for, he was the COO and he ran Nickelodeon. And Nickelodeon did very well. And he eventually hooked up with Bob Pittman, who, like you said, was developing the Movie Channel, which I sorely miss. The Movie Channel was great.

[Josh]

That was my favorite one too. I don't know why, but it was my favorite because it was only movies. Yeah, I guess so.

[Chuck]

I bet you that was it. Because for a kid, even though HBO was great, they had other stuff. And as a kid you were like, I just want movies. And that's what the Movie Channel was.

[Josh]

I just want to see Outland. What's the problem?

[Chuck]

Oh, man, you ain't kidding. So Bob was running that Lack, John Lack came to Bob and said, hey, what do you think about doing something? If you're doing this movie only channel, what about a music only thing? And so Bob Pittman said, great, let's call it TV one. And they went, no, no, that's already a thing. And he went, all right, how about tvm, like TV music? And everyone went, well, what about mtv? We think that sounds a little better. And he said, all right, yeah.

[Josh]

And don't feel bad for Mike Nesmith. He wasn't like squeezed out or they didn't steal his idea. He was invited to be a part of the whole thing and he was not interested. He has always considered himself an artiste and didn't want to get into the corporate nitty gritty of it. So he said, just buy me out and I'll go along my way. But he did essentially kind of come up with the concept in the format. And then Pittman and Lack took it over with a couple of other guys, Fred Siebert and Alan Goodman, whose experience, I think up to that point had been working together at a Columbia University student radio station. Yeah, so these people are. We're all young, pretty hip. It's the early 80s. And again, this. The idea that there are promotional music videos already in existence out there and that the record companies give them away for free was the basis of where MTV and all of the other, like, music video programs came from. Because you could make this thing on the cheap. Because again, record companies were giving these things away for free and saying, yes, play them via con dios. It will only help us if you play these things on tv.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I remember when I met Bob for the first time in New York at the iHeart offices. Our boss, Connell, took me by. I think we had an official meeting with him, but I was like, connel, like, I gotta say something about mtb. I said, is that verboten? Is that not the kind of thing he's like, oh, no, man. He was like, you should definitely say something. And I met Bob, and I was like, Mr. Pittman. I said, I just want to let you know. I was like, I was the guy. I was that kid who sat there at 10 years old, galooed to my television, watching MTV as many hours as I was allowed to consume it. I was like, I was that kid. And he was like, you know, he said, we counted on you and everyone like you doing that same thing. Otherwise it would not have been a success. So he thanked me, which I thought was very cool.

[Josh]

Well, you have to finish the story all the way.

[Chuck]

What was the end that he came.

[Josh]

Around his desk with tears in his eyes and embraced you for a good minute? Connell said.

[Chuck]

No, no, no, no, he did not. But I think I touched him maybe a bit. I don't know. Who can tell? He sent me a ball of tequila.

[Josh]

One Christmas, so I got one of those, too.

[Chuck]

Oh, well, see, I guess you didn't make him cry, though, did you?

[Josh]

No, but I touched him.

[Chuck]

That's right. So he hires these kids from the radio station, like you mentioned. They've got these videos. They need the other stuff. They need the logo, they need the theme song. They need the stuff in between the music videos. Not only just the cast, which we're gonna talk about, but, you know, like the bump, the video bumpers and stuff like that. So they brought in, again, teams of friends to do this stuff.

[Josh]

Yeah, there was, I guess, a guy named Franco Linsky, who was a friend of Fred Siebert, remember one of the Columbia radio station guys, and he was creating a design studio, and he created the logo and apparently just got it right out of the gate like it was. There were not many iterations of it. Like, he just nailed it. And there are very few logos that are more recognizable than mtv, in part because it spells out the name in the logo. So you kind of know exactly what the logo's for, but it's still pretty recognizable.

[Chuck]

It's a great logo.

[Josh]

It really is. And then the musical riffs, including the one that you did at the top of the podcast, those were created by a couple of guys named Scott Ellias and Jonathan Peterson, and they based it on the Kinks. You really got me.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it's, you know, similar, I guess.

[Josh]

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, you can definitely tell when you hear that. But I never thought, like, yeah, things rip off, you know?

[Chuck]

Yeah. And then that moon man, the moon landing, became as sort of tied to MTV as anything else. And is it because they thought, hey, we're also embarking on a journey not yet known? Sure. Is it because it was one small step for television and a giant leap for the music industry? Of course. Was it also because that stuff was public domain and rights free? Absolutely, yeah.

[Josh]

If the US Government, which NASA is an agency of the US Government, the US Government owns something, you. You own it too. As an American. It's in the public domain, buddy. One of the other reasons, though, that I saw was that they were trying to basically say, like, this is as monumental a cultural event as landing on the moon was.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. They initially had a version with Neil Armstrong, and I could swear I remember hearing one small step for me, one giant leap for mankind. And I guess I watched the first few days. I mean, I know I did. So that must have leaked in there because I definitely remember hearing that version. But Neil Armstrong came forward and he was like, no, no, no, no, no. That may be in the public domain, but that's my voice. You can't use my voice. So John lack of said, he replaced that by saying a recording of himself. Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll. And that was it. Apparently after the challenge disaster, that branding ended in 1986. But I didn't know that. I know the moon man is still the VMA trophy, so maybe just parts of it continued on. I don't know.

[Josh]

I could see them taking it off the air temporarily because I definitely remember seeing it too. I would guess after 1986, but I thought, so, yes, I could see the challenger disaster happening, being like, let's just not do anything space related right now.

[Chuck]

Yeah. What about the taglines? You had a couple of those early on too, right?

[Josh]

The idents, you mean? Oh, the tagline. Sorry. Yeah, apparently it was, you'll never look at music the same way again. Pretty fun on cable, in stereo. Yeah, yeah, They're. They're okay. That and ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll. They just sound like they're delivered by somebody wearing rainbow suspenders. Maybe just real like late 70s, early 80s kind of branding stuff.

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

[Josh]

But what about the idents, the identifying, I guess, snippets? I'm not sure what the actual TV trade name is for them.

[Chuck]

I think I called them bumpers earlier. I'm not sure what the trade name Is either. But I don't. I don't know what. Where you're headed here, so take it away.

[Josh]

Oh, well, it's like station branding, showing you what network you're. You're watching. And MTV became really famous for all sorts of weird and bizarre ways of showing. Like, are you watching mtv? Like one of the really famous ones that I remember was. It was a guillotine suddenly coming down. And you had no idea what was going on. It was just. The whole thing started on a shot of a guillotine blade falling. And then all of a sudden in the basket or on the floor of the gallows or wherever a head falls down and the head is in the shape of the M and there's two eyes and like a tongue sticking out and. And it's this really weird, unsettling claymation head. But it's the MTV logo.

[Chuck]

Yeah. You know, we did. If anyone saw our short run of the Stuff youf Should Know TV show, we had some very. I think it was almost like an homage. Some very similar bumpers that came in and out of commercial break for our TV show that were animations done by our friend Russ.

[Josh]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

Who did a phenomenal job. They're just like. It's one of the coolest things about that show still, I think.

[Josh]

Yeah. And also, if you want to see some MTV idents, There's something on YouTube titled Creepy MTV Ident and Logos Collection 1990s. And it's I think like 25 minutes of these 10 second clips.

[Chuck]

Amazing. I'll have to check that out.

[Josh]

Yeah, you definitely should. Sorry I didn't send it to you.

[Chuck]

That's okay.

[Josh]

No, it's not, Chuck. I'm sorry.

[Chuck]

On August 1st, just after midnight, 1981 is when MTV formally premiered. Sort of. I mean, I guess it did formally appear, but unless you lived in just parts of New Jersey, then you wouldn't see it because there was only one cable operator who even carried it at the time. And the cast even had to like pile in a rented school bus to drive to Fort Lee, New Jersey, at a bar called the Loft. Cause they knew that they would have it there. But the very first images that came on screen was the Columbia space shuttle launching. That moon landing that we spoke of, the MTV logo and of course that musical riff all put together. And what is now the most tired and obvious trivia question of all time, probably the very first video to play. And I'm not making fun of you if you didn't know this, but it just feels like one of those. It's like, oh, my God. Everybody knows that the Buggles video Killed the Radio Star was the first MTV video.

[Josh]

Yeah. Which is appropriate. Video Killed the radio Star. Although it did quite the opposite, though. It actually made the Radio Star into even bigger stars, as we'll see.

[Chuck]

Unless you weren't good at videos.

[Josh]

No. Or you didn't want to make a video. You were basically making a massive career choice right then in the 80s and 90s to just basically be like, no, I don't want to be that huge, so I'm not going to play MTV's game.

[Chuck]

Yeah. I think the question now at Bar Trivia should be, everybody knows that video Kill the Radio Star was the first music video played on mtv. What was the second?

[Josh]

Oh, do you know? Because I don't have that list.

[Chuck]

It was Pat Benatar. You better run. In that first 24 hours, there were 116 unique videos for 209 total plays. So, yes, there were plenty of repeats. The pretender's brass in pocket, the who you better, you bet was the first one to be repeated. Rod Stewart had. This is shocking. On the very first day of MTV, Rod Stewart had 11, not just videos playing. He had 11 different videos playing for 16 total plays.

[Josh]

Yeah. That's amazing.

[Chuck]

And your boys, Iron Maiden were in that first. They were in the top 20, buddy. Number 16 was the song Iron Maiden.

[Josh]

Yeah. And then later on, they played Wrathchild, too. So they had two videos in the first 24 hours.

[Chuck]

Yeah. So, I mean, if you kind of put all those together, what you're seeing is a very, very varied lineup. Even though they were replaying stuff like Phil Collins in the Air Tonight and Just between you and me by April Wine. Those were each played five times on the first day. But, you know, they had a. To call when you don't have a lot of stuff in stock. Problem.

[Josh]

I don't know, A supply problem. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, it was so varied. I saw that they played the video for Andrew Gold's thank you for Being a Friend, which went on to become the Golden Girls theme. That was the 54th video played on MTV ever, and they only played it once.

[Chuck]

But who was playing this? VJs. They had to start out with an initial lineup of VJs. Bob Pittman very much had. I think it was kind of Breakfast Clubby. He wanted very specific archetypes of youngish people. He said, we need a black person. Which was J.J. jackson, 41 years old, by the way. So he was sort of the old guy for the 10 year old that was watching.

[Josh]

Wow.

[Chuck]

We need a girl next door. Which was Martha Quinn, 22 years old. I think she was the youngest. We need a sexy little siren, clearly Nina Blackwood. We need a boy next door. That would have been Alan Hunter. And then we need some hunky Italian looking guy with curly hair. And that was of course Mark Goodman.

[Josh]

And I think Mark Goodman was the first VJ on.

[Chuck]

Oh, I thought it was Alan Hunter.

[Josh]

I'm pretty sure it was Mark Goodman. I watched like there are all sorts of videos of, you know, the first hour, the first two hours, the first whatever hours of mtv and I watched the first little bit of it and it, I'm pretty sure it was Mark Goodman who was first.

[Chuck]

Oh, okay.

[Josh]

We'll find out eventually one day. I did see that. I think VH1 rebroadcast the first 24 hours of MTV once, not too many years ago.

[Chuck]

Oh, well that's fun.

[Josh]

Yeah, just as like a. Hey guys, we like you over here.

[Chuck]

And also I'm a semi recent subscriber to SiriusXM. Oh yeah. I don't know why I resisted for so many years. Maybe I just didn't know as much about it. But I love it. It's great. It's fun to have somebody curating music and not constantly for me at least be sitting around going like, oh God, what do I want to listen to? I can't think of anything. What can I play? And it's great. And they got great channels. This is not an ad for them. But I really, really am enjoying it. And there are a few shows on a few stations from those VJs. I think Martha Quinn has a show.

[Josh]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Chuck]

Alan Hunter has one. Mark Goodman. I think Nina Blackwood used to too. I'm not sure if Martha Quinn still does, but yeah, it's cool to. And I didn't even know like I'll just be listening to a cool station and it's like Mark Goodman pops up. It's nice.

[Josh]

I feel like they owe you at least a free month or a hat, a baseball cap at least.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it happened a free year.

[Josh]

Okay. Yeah. So did you finally cave when the offer for how much it would cost you a month kept going down and it got into like the $50 area. Yeah.

[Chuck]

And that's the sort of the, the ticket. You just wait for a good deal first 12 months or like 5 bucks.

[Josh]

Or something and they said, well, there goes your free year. Chuck.

[Chuck]

A couple of comedians early on that went on to be noteworthy were rejected. Richard Belzer which is hysterical to think of him as an MTV vj.

[Josh]

He was so cool, though.

[Chuck]

Oh, I love bells. And then Carol Leifer was a comedian who later went on to write for Seinfeld.

[Josh]

Yes, she did pretty well for herself. Yeah. The thing is, in retrospect, today you're like, yeah, MTV was huge. Not at first. Like you said. Basically, Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the first and only place to have access to mtv. And like you said, New Jersey was the only place. Just a few small parts of New Jersey was the only place where you could see mtv. So it wasn't out of the gate, like a sure bet that MTV was going to become a huge cable juggernaut. And to kind of help spread the word that there was such a thing as mtv, an ad agency called lpg, Pon Agency very wisely came up with the I want my MTV campaign. And I remember seeing those on mtv. But they were originally designed to play on other networks, to get people watching at home to call their cable operator and say, hey, man, I want my mtv. And it worked. Yeah.

[Chuck]

I mean, basically, any musician that came through the MTV office and studio, I think they just had like a standing set where they could say, just go in there and however you want to do it, say, I want my mtv. And that's why they were also kind of fun and varied and clearly off the cuff. But it became part of their branding such that the. One of my favorite groups, Dire Straits, in 1985, immortalized it via Sting as a guest singer singing I Want my mtv. At the beginning of the song Money for Nothing, which would also become a huge, huge music video.

[Josh]

Uncredited guest, I think, even.

[Chuck]

Meaning, like, they didn't pay him.

[Josh]

No, that they didn't say end Sting, ladies and gentlemen. What?

[Chuck]

Like in the song?

[Josh]

Yeah, that's what I would have expected. Who does that?

[Chuck]

Like, before Dolly Parton's verse in Island's in the Stream, Kenny Rogers just goes, and now Dolly Parton.

[Josh]

I could totally see that he would pull it off, too.

[Chuck]

He totally could have.

[Josh]

So one of the things that also helped the channel spread, especially by word of mouth among their target market, which was teens, especially teens who got fat allowances from their parents, is that some conservative places were like, we're not carrying this mtv. And they made the terrible mistake of actually publicizing that they weren't going to carry mtv. And they were like Christian organizations. The Parents Music Resource center would kind of get in the craw of mtv, but simultaneously give it really good press.

[Chuck]

Right.

[Josh]

Because if your parents didn't Want you watching it. You definitely wanted to watch mtv.

[Chuck]

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I mentioned that supply problem. I do have a number here, thanks to Livia. There were only 250 videos at first. So if you look at the Math, they played 209 videos on the first day. So they sort of spent their allowance almost fully on that first day. So for a long time you were seeing videos repeated heavily in heavy rotation. And even once they had, you know, it was sort of like the radio, like the ones that were hit got played more. Even when they did have the supply.

[Josh]

I friend did a little bit of math. Ooh.

[Chuck]

Oh, God. It's always my favorite part.

[Josh]

At an average of three minutes per video, which I think is a good average, they would have to start over every 12 hours.

[Chuck]

Oh, if they just didn't repeat ones. And they just played their whole supply.

[Josh]

Yeah, the whole wide.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

One thing though, there was this. There's a documentary out on Devo that's really good on Netflix.

[Chuck]

Oh, I still haven't seen it.

[Josh]

It's really good, I think. And they really kind of talk a lot about how Devo. So Devo, in the early days, they were an art collective as much as a band. And so they made quirky, weird films for their songs. So they were making music videos before MTV and they didn't have anywhere to show em. And then MTV came along and Devo helped make mtv. They gave them more really good, like, videos that people wanted to see.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And then as. As MTV got bigger and bigger and more and more commercial, Devo got left to the wayside, forgotten. You could say it's actually kind of sad as things just kind of started to go downhill for the band. But that was a big point that they made. And I think something overlooked that there were a lot of interesting pioneering groups that were making videos even before MTV came along that MTV digested and fed itself on and grew big on. And then they just got left because all of a sudden Kip Winger was like, oh, if I take my shirt off and tease my hair out, put a little Aqua Net in there, I can make a video too. And they're like, no, no, no, it's not quite that easy. We need to film it in black and white. Video. And then you'll have a video. He's like, okay, let's do it.

[Chuck]

And Kip Winger's like, yeah, but like, don't you understand? My song's about 17 year old girls.

[Josh]

Yeah, it really is. There's no getting around it. The only one that's worse or more blatant than that is Benny Madrones. Oh no, his is End of the Night where he's like trying to spring like a middle schooler or something like that from her parents house.

[Chuck]

Oh, I don't remember that.

[Josh]

If I could fly, I'd pick you up and take you into the night.

[Chuck]

Oh, I know that song. Yeah, yeah, it's a great song but super creepy.

[Josh]

You just can't stop and think about what he's saying.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Or watch the Lionel Richie video for hello, is it me you're looking for. It's kind of a sweet song. But in the video he's like a teacher that seemingly stalking a blind student.

[Josh]

Right. And a sculptor. Right. An art teacher.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I think so. It's one of those. At the time you're like, oh that's sweet. Now you're like, oh my God, like fire that teacher.

[Josh]

Right. There's a lot of 80s and 90s media that's like that.

[Chuck]

Yeah. One thing I did want to say when you were talking about Devo, like I can say for sure that 10 year old Chuck would not have known about Devo or the Talking Heads.

[Josh]

Right.

[Chuck]

Or like do you remember the Art of Noise video?

[Josh]

Oh like the super cool like animation.

[Chuck]

It was like herky jerky stop motion with like chainsawing mannequins.

[Josh]

And what was the name of the song?

[Chuck]

I don't remember the name of the song but Art of Boys was the band. But like there's no way I would have known. Like I was listening to top 40 radio and then in a couple years my brother in law would start feeding me southern rock and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers and stuff like that. And like there's no way I would have been listening to any artsy stuff like that. Cause that didn't come along for me until I started listening to alternative music in like the 9th and 10th grade, you know.

[Josh]

And I think a lot of people out there would be like, well no Chuck, you would have heard Devo on the radio or you would have heard.

[Chuck]

I doubt it.

[Josh]

Maybe Talking Heads. Right. The point is, is the reason you heard those on the radio is because of mtv. Because when it became clear that if you gave MTV promotional videos for free and they played them.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

You were going to start selling records in that cable operators region. That's just what happened. It became very clear, very quantifiable early on that where MTV played a song and it didn't matter if it was a well known band or Someone you'd never heard of. Those records were going to sell in local record stores. And from that point on, MTV was basically. It had its, its path set out for them.

[Chuck]

Yeah, man, Devo is so good. If your only experience with Devo is the Satisfaction, the Rolling Stones cover or Whip it, both of which are great songs, do yourself a favor and just dive in. It's amazing music. I love Deebo. And shout out, of course, to Akron, Akron, Akron and Firestone High school.

[Josh]

Chuck, we're 30 minutes in and we haven't taken an ad break yet.

[Chuck]

I thought we took one.

[Josh]

No, I don't think so. Did we? Let's ask Jerry to rule on this. Jerry, you have not. Okay.

[Chuck]

All right, Jerry. Verified. And hopefully we can leave that in there. Jerry's voice. I don't know if she's going to be okay with it or not, but this one's clearly going to be super size, so maybe 30 minutes is about right.

[Josh]

Okay, so we're going to cut to commercial break right now. Will you play us out with the music Stinger? No.

[Chuck]

Oh. Oh, me? I thought you meant Jerry.

[Josh]

No, you. Very nice.

[Public Ad Voice]

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[Josh]

Okay, Chuck, so one of the things I definitely associate with MTV is Michael Jackson's Thriller. I was into Thriller. I had the red Thriller jacket. My mom made me a white sequin glove for my first communion as a gift. I was super into Michael Jackson and I loved Thriller so much that my family bought the making of the Thriller video on VHS and my sister watched it essentially until it broke. So I always associate MTV with Thriller. Anytime I knew it was coming on, I would go watch it. It was awesome. But it turns out like Michael Jackson and his record label had to basically fight to get onto mtv, which is mind boggling to me these days.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. This was 1982 when the Landmark album came out. There's a very funny Vincent Price story because Vincent Price, obviously the legendary spooky Ector was in the 13 minute mini movie that accompanied Thriller as the video. And Vincent Price had an option apparently to either take a flat fee of like, I don't even know how much it was, 20 grand or something.

[Josh]

That's what I was gonna say.

[Chuck]

Or get. Yeah, that sounds about right. Or get points on the Thriller album. And he clearly opted for the flat fee.

[Josh]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck]

And would go on to regret that for many years. And apparently over the years called Michael Jackson a lot, trying to sort of get back that deal, which his calls were never returned. And I will just let the listener look up the quote, apparently that came out about Vincent Price when Michael Jackson settled with his alleged victims many years later. I'm not going to say it here, but you can go look it up if you want.

[Josh]

Okay. One other thing about that album too, that was interesting. Billie Jean was on there. I know Beat it was on there. They both were. But Eddie Van Halen played guitar on Beat It. That very famous, like, guitar solo.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh]

And apparently at the time Van Halen had like a no outside work deal with one another. Yeah, all they could do is focus on Van Halen. And so Eddie Van Halen had the opportunities, like, yeah, I don't think anybody will hear this record. I'm just going to play on this dude's record and no one will know about it because it'll be uncredited. And sure enough, it turns out that Beat it and Thriller became one of the biggest selling albums of all time.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I mean, well, people sort of like, how could been surprised have done that? But Michael Jackson wasn't that level until after Thriller. So, no, I mean, off the Wall was out, of course, and he was with the Jackson 5, but no one knew it was going to be one of the best selling, if not the best selling albums of all time.

[Josh]

Man, poor Vincent Price. I didn't know that.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And also in regards to Thriller, it was a $900,000 budget for that video directed by John Landis. And part of the funding came from Josh's parents because they ended up selling the making of on VHS, like you mentioned, 100,000 copies of that in advance for 29.95. Showtime paid $300,000 to see the documentary, or I'm sorry, just to air the documentary. And MTV paid another quarter of a million dollars for the ultimate rights.

[Josh]

So that's just the documentary.

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah. Cause the videos were free.

[Josh]

Yeah. For the making of Thriller, the documentary. And it was good. It was like an hour and 10 minutes long. I looked it up.

[Chuck]

Oh yeah, I watched it.

[Josh]

So one of the reasons why Thriller was a big deal is because there weren't a lot of black performers or artists on MTV at the time. So much so that David Bowie very famously called MTV out in an interview on MTV with Mark Goodman. And he basically just said, like, what's. What's the deal here? I think is his actually quote is, what the holy heck is going on with you guys? And it was. It was true. I mean, like, you just couldn't put it any other way. And MTV basically said, well, we play rock. And it's actually rock's fault because they're the ones who exclude Black Axe by calling them R and B and not rock. So blame. Blame the music industry, not us. And that didn't fly. That wasn't good enough. There's a guy who's. If there's a hero in the story, it's him. His name is Walter Yetnikov. I think he was the head of CBS Records at the time. And he said, if you don't start playing these singles, these videos off of Michael Jackson's Thriller album, we're pulling all of CBS Records artists. You're not going to get A single video from any of them. And that was significant because they made up about a quarter of the videos that were playing on MTV at the time.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And part two of that, and this is for real, he said, we will publicly accuse you of racism if you don't start playing these.

[Josh]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

So I think that really hit home. Obviously they got Billie Jean and Beat it in the rotation fairly heavily at first, but Livia said she found that that didn't last too long. I feel like I remember seeing those ad nauseam forever.

[Josh]

Oh, really? I remember not seeing them as often as I wanted.

[Chuck]

Oh, well, you also had a sequin white glove on, so you might have wanted to hear more than me. I don't know.

[Josh]

Yeah, that's true.

[Chuck]

I love those songs, though. And I remember working a commercial job one time with my longtime production manager, Andrea, and she very casually dropped that. She was a production coordinator on the Beat it video one time. And I was like, excuse me. One of the fun things about doing that stuff in LA is you would always meet people that just worked on these legendary jobs. Every now and then it's like, yeah, yeah, I was the lighting guy for whatever for Thriller.

[Josh]

That's cool.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

So by this time we're talking mid-80s and MTV is now the place that is making the names of the artists who are making videos for their music, Right?

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And the more daring you were or the more Kip Winger esque you were, you could make a really big name for yourself. It didn't matter all that much whether your music was particularly good. Sometimes it didn't matter whether your video was even particularly good. If you could get onto MTV and nail it in just the right way, they would play it a lot and you would sell a lot of records and your. Your career would be made. And it's no overstatement to say that Madonna's career was made. Who else? Chuck?

[Chuck]

Well, I mean, people that already had good careers were launched into the stratosphere. Like people like Billy Joel, who was already a prominent artist. All of a sudden he's putting out some of the buzzband, like groundbreaking videos like Pressure. And then when he married or was dating at least Christie Brinkley.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah, I remember that video.

[Chuck]

And like the video for Uptown Girl. And all of a sudden the biggest supermodel on planet earth was on MTV. It was a big deal. They started the top 20 video countdown in 1984. So all of a sudden that is rivaling American top 40 on radio as far as like, where the kids are going to see the top content. The VMAs. The Video Music Awards started also in 1984 and had plenty of iconic moments. And very quickly, like music video directors, it became sort of a farm league for people that would go on to be huge. Huge movie directors started out in music videos.

[Josh]

Or it went the other way too. I saw that William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist in 1983, also directed Laura Brannigan's video for Self Control in 1983. Yeah, you know the one where she lives among the creatures of the night?

[Chuck]

Uh huh.

[Josh]

She doesn't have the will to try and fight.

[Chuck]

I remember that. I love Laura Brannigan.

[Josh]

That's a great song. It beats the heck out of Gloria if you ask me.

[Chuck]

I like Gloria.

[Josh]

I mean, I guess you don't have to choose. But I still like Self Control more. But yeah, William Friedkin of the Exorcist directed that video.

[Chuck]

That's true, but far more often, to be fair, it went the other way. And people started out in music videos and went on to be very popular film directors. David Fincher directed Vogue from Madonna, the End of Innocence from Don Henley. Janie's Got a Gun from Aerosmith. Not the Aerosmith videos that featured Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone that were also iconic. He also directed the George Michael Freedom 90 video, which talk about supermodels. Like every supermodel under the sun was in that one.

[Josh]

I was reading about George Michael's I Want yout Sex video and I was like, I guarantee that was as controversial as anything was when it came out. And so I went on to our beloved newspapers.com and looked for some contemporary articles on that. Yeah, and dude, the stuff that they were saying like should videos, should sexy videos be banned? There are limits to artists rights. And all this just junk, censorship, junk that today is like, this is what like you guys were amusing yourselves with in the mid to late 80s and it absolutely was. And if you go back and look at the video, it is objectively sexy. But to ban anything because of this video, it's just mind bogglingly stupid. Today in 2025.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. Another group of directors, Michel Gondry and Spike Jones got their starts. If you want to talk about just sort of groundbreaking videos. Peter Gabriel's sledgehammer in 1986.

[Josh]

Yes.

[Chuck]

It was directed by Steven R. Johnson, the amazing stop motion Animation with the help of the Brothers Quay and Aardman Animations. That was a big one. And then of course, the Aha Take on Me video was a huge, huge breakthrough.

[Josh]

Video, man, such a great song still. Yeah, like the kind of song you can listen to on repeat still. I mean, think about how many times you've heard Take On Me.

[Chuck]

I love the song.

[Josh]

It's a really great song still. But yes, that video's amazing. And plus, I mean, it didn't hurt that the lead singer was about as dreamy as a person on MTV could be.

[Chuck]

Yeah, they're all hot dudes.

[Josh]

Yeah. I remember my sister with her hands clasped under her chin, just, like, staring at the TV whenever that guy came on.

[Chuck]

We should mention just for Livia too, because Livia wrote this and she clearly has a soft spot in her heart for Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart video.

[Josh]

Yeah. She pointed out that there is a literal version that they sing. Like they change the lyrics based on what's going on in the video. It's pretty hilarious. There's some other ones too that definitely made mtv because as we talked about in Saturday morning cartoons, MTV provided a bardic function for American teenagers and eventually teenagers around the world. Like, when you went and watched the top 20 countdown, you were seeing, as all of your friends were seeing at the same time, what was cool that week. Right. Or you talked about, like, have you seen the ZZ Top video? Like, ZZ Top had a trio of videos called the Eliminator series for legs, sharp dressed man, give me all your loving. And it featured like, that super cool, like, 1930s car or whatever with the ZZ Top keychain and their guitar and their bass would spin on the axis. They could just twirl em. You remember that? And they were fuzzy. They were just really cool videos. And I remember just being like, wow, I like these videos a lot because they were super sexy. But I recently read how, like, essentially a feminist defense of those videos. And they pointed out that the people who were the villains were people who were like, sexually harassing the three women in the Eliminator series and that they would always get their comeuppance.

[Public Ad Voice]

And.

[Josh]

And ZZ Top was always cheering for these three, I guess, muses or angels or whoever who would come out of the blue and save the day.

[Chuck]

Yeah, angels and fishnet hoes.

[Josh]

Exactly.

[Chuck]

I don't know if there was ever a group that was less likely to be MTV stars than ZZ Top was.

[Josh]

They were saying that there was a quote where they were like, you know, we had basically had our run in rock. Not even rock and roll.

[Chuck]

Texas Blues band.

[Josh]

Exactly. I think it was. This is in like, Texas Monthly, maybe magazine. Because, yeah, they're from Texas. And then all of a sudden, because of these videos, because of mtv, they had a brand new career, essentially. And I think Billy Gibbons was the one who was quoted who said, like, we got 16 year old girls back as fans, you know, like. So. Yeah, that's a really great point. They were extremely unlikely. And that demonstrates the power of what MTV could do. If you made a cool video people talked about, you could have a brand new career on your hands.

[Chuck]

I know you want to shout out Weird Al, somebody that I've never been that into, but I was an MTV kid, so I definitely saw and generally had a laugh with a lot of those videos.

[Josh]

They were great. He apparently had 10 specials on MTV over the years called ALTV. But yeah, that was another one too. Like you'd be like, have you seen Weird Al's Like a Surgeon video where I lost on Jeopardy stuff? And then one other one too, that was a really big video early on was the video for Fish Heads from Barnes and Barn. Do you remember that?

[Chuck]

Yeah, I mean, I don't remember that being a very big song or video at all. I thought it was just noteworthy because it was Bill Paxton or was that a big song?

[Josh]

I think it was one of those ones that made people go watch MTV because it would come on sometimes.

[Chuck]

Okay.

[Josh]

I don't think it was like a huge hit or anything like that, but it was one of those. One of those early videos that drew you to MTV by word of mouth.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Kind of like MC Scat Cat.

[Josh]

That's right.

[Chuck]

Baller Abdul.

[Josh]

Yep, I remember that. Wait, wait, we're getting nostalgic. We failed.

[Chuck]

I know, I know. That failed a long time ago. But we do have to mention the Hungry like the Wolf video from Duran Duran because that was. It certainly wasn't the first, but that was maybe the best example of music video as like a very cinematic, you know, where. Where all of a sudden it was like the band was in a movie and. And it was like. It's not like they weren't a big band before. But Hungry like the Wolf really put them over the top.

[Josh]

Yeah, for sure. And just changed the. The way that people made videos too. They made a much more. Like it was a movie.

[Chuck]

Yeah, a pretty good one, I thought.

[Josh]

Yeah. And a good song too.

[Chuck]

Should we take our second break here at minute 47?

[Josh]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

All right, we'll be right back because there's plenty more to talk about with mtv.

[Public Ad Voice]

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[Chuck]

So MTV was a pretty big success in the mid-80s, obviously. So much so that Turner Broadcasting TBS tried to compete with their cable music channel. I think the country music. I'm sorry, the cable music channel CMT started around the same time. There were a lot of imitators. Most of them fizzled out. I think the Turner one was bought out by MTV for about a million bucks. But in 1985 Viacom Inc. Bought MTV from Warner and leadership said, hey, why don't we stop just playing random videos and start sort of bucketing this stuff. And all of a sudden they had thematic shows like 120 Minutes and Headbangers Ball and Yo MTV Raps and stuff like that.

[Josh]

Yeah. Yes, 120 minutes always has a soft spot in My heart. Because you had to stay up on Sunday night. It started Sunday night at midnight. So technically it started Monday morning at midnight and ran for 120 minutes till 2am it's like the worst time slot in the history of time slots. And yet that was the only place you could see like, a Susie and the Banshees video or like Jesus and Mary Chain or whoever. Like, that's the only place you could see those videos. And it was worth staying up for.

[Chuck]

Yeah. The great Matt Penfield. Shout out to him as host Club MTV in 1987 with Downtown Julie Brown. That was their dance show, their sort of Soul Train, American Bandstand style show. I'd say just go listen to the heavy metal episodes if you want to hear more about Headbangers Ball.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

But yo, MTV rap started in 1988 and that was like Run DMC had been on, I think in 84 with Rockbox. But yo, MTV Raps cannot be under or overestimated, I guess, as what a role it played in bringing hip hop and rap to the mainstream.

[Josh]

Yeah. And if you want a new trivia question to replace the Buggles video Killed the radio star. The first rap video played on Yo, MTV Raps was Shinehead's Chain Gang.

[Chuck]

Oh, okay.

[Josh]

You remember that one.

[Chuck]

I don't. Not at all, actually. Do you?

[Josh]

You know the sound of the men working on the Chain Gang?

[Chuck]

Yeah, I know.

[Josh]

That's like a hip hop version of that.

[Chuck]

Oh, okay.

[Josh]

It's good. Go listen to it.

[Chuck]

Yeah. They were also famous for banning some of these. And again, you're gonna get more attention by doing something like that. So NWA had some of their stuff banned. Public Enemy, the great song by the Time I Get To Arizona, was banned in 1991. And then also one of my favorite shows was Unplugged.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck]

Started in 1989 where they did, you know, they had bands in studio, live in concert, doing, you know, acoustic numbers of their. Of their hits. And some of the Unplugged albums became just sort of iconic legendary vinyl LPs for those bands, just because people had never heard them that way before. Like Nirvana and Oasis and stuff like that.

[Josh]

Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah. I was like, I never really ever watch MTV Unplugged. I wasn't very aware of it now that you said that Nirvana song. Yes, I remember now.

[Chuck]

Yeah, REMS was awesome. And, you know, they had some sort of obvious Unplugged stuff like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. But I think it was when the rock bands did it is when it Got the most attention and was maybe at its best, for sure.

[Josh]

Or Depeche Mode. So one other thing that was huge, just huge. That started out as just some small thing that they tried was in 1986, Alan Hunter took everybody to Daytona beach and they basically just covered spring break. Yeah. And spring break became an annual event on MTV for decades to come. It was just a huge deal. Every spring break was covered. And it was just people, like, doing shots or dancing or whatever, like on the beach playing volleyball. It was just all lame and dumb. But it was exactly the kind of thing you wanted to see if it was like April in Northern Ohio. Because it didn't look like that outside in April in Northern Ohio. So, like, it just brought you down to the beach with all these beautiful people. And it was. It was a great experience, for sure. And then that also kind of gave birth to beach MTV or MTV Beach House later on, which they would basically just rent a beach house and broadcast from there for the summer.

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh]

It just made Summer. Summer, you know what I'm saying?

[Chuck]

Like, sort of like the official kickoff.

[Josh]

Yeah, yeah. Or like even like in the middle of summer, just seeing that in the morning, you know, getting ready to go hang out with friends. Cause school was out. It just. It was like a punctuation mark for summer. It just made it more of a summer to me.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. I totally agree. MTV News was another non music show. That's kind of where we're headed in this segment. And it was a very big deal. I remember that they had a very iconic intro too, with the typewriter spelling out MTV News. And that sound that it made. Yeah, do that louder.

[Josh]

He just did it. Great.

[Chuck]

Your first try was better. Kurt Loder, though, was a veteran rock journalist. And he was sort of the Main face in 1987. But they also had like, Chris Connolly. He ended up being the movie guy. He was the MTV News guy for a while. I had many, many crushes via MTV News, like Tabitha Soren and Serena Altschule and even a little bit of Kennedy.

[Josh]

Yeah, Kennedy. Remember Duffy?

[Chuck]

Oh, I remember Duffy. She lived in a friend of mine's building in New York in the Greenwich village in the mid-90s. And I saw her in the elevator once and almost passed out.

[Josh]

I'll bet. I think the one who could top them all, though, was Daisy Fuentes.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about her. Daisy Fuentes.

[Josh]

Daisy Fuentes. So anyway, moving on. There was game show on MTV for I think just like a year maybe called Remote Control came on in 1987. And if anyone asks you what MTV's first regular non music programming was, it was Remote Control. And I loved remote control.

[Chuck]

Me too. It had to be more than a year because Ken Ober was the host. Unless they just replaced the host mid year, which I don't remember because another crush, Kari Wer, took over for Ken Ober at a certain point. But Remote Control was very funny and a great game show for people our age. And to me it was most noteworthy is launching the careers of Colin Quinn.

[Josh]

Yes.

[Chuck]

Who was the sidekick. And a young Adam Sandler and Dennis Leary got their start there.

[Josh]

Yeah, they were both writers. And then Adam Sandler also played some early characters, one of which was Stud Boy. But it was great. It had one of the all time best sets of not just any game show, but any TV show. It was set in Ken Ober's parents basement and it was all about. All the questions were about TV and TV history and stuff. It was really wonderful. Like the people, the players played from recliners and if I remember correctly, if you lost the recliner went sailing backwards through the wall, I think. So that was a great show.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it's funny, I didn't watch any clips, but in my brain it just popped into my head. The intro was something like I wasn't like the other kids or something like that.

[Josh]

Right. Okay. It was. Kenny wasn't like the other kids.

[Chuck]

Oh, that's it.

[Josh]

TD mattered. Nothing else did. Nothing else did. Girl said yes, but he said no. Now he's got his own game show.

[Chuck]

Do you remember that or did you look that up?

[Josh]

I remembered it. I did not look up a word of that.

[Chuck]

That's so funny, man. I knew there was something there about not being like the other kids.

[Josh]

It's good because. Yeah, he just wanted to watch TV. So now he has a game show about TV.

[Chuck]

House of Style 1989, a fashion show hosted by Cindy Crawford was huge. As far as comedy goes, it turns out beyond remote control being very funny. They launched like they were sneakily one of the great comedy incubators of the 80s, I feel like.

[Josh]

Yeah. And 90s.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah. Into the 90s. Cause the state the great. To me, the best sketch show of all time was the State.

[Josh]

Oh yeah.

[Chuck]

From 94 to 95 on MTV. The Ben Stiller show in 1990 was amazing and very underseen and underrated.

[Josh]

Did you watch that when it was on?

[Chuck]

Oh yeah.

[Josh]

I did not.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I was into all of that.

[Josh]

So that launched Janine Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk. David Cross, Judd Apatow, Andy Dick, for better or worse. Ben Stiller, obviously. Cause before that he was just Jerry Stiller's kid.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And this was where he introduced himself to the world. And we have severance thanks to the show. So thanks a lot, mtv. But it also brought together Bob Odenkirk and David Cross with Dinos Demetopoulos, who was also a writer on the show with them. And they went on to make Mr. Show.

[Chuck]

Now that actually might be my favorite sketch show.

[Josh]

I think so, too. But I went back, so I was like, I haven't seen a second of this show. And I found a great sketch with Bob Odenkirk as Charles Manson. Yeah, yeah. But Charles Manson is Lassie. It's like a black and white parody of Lassie. But rather than Lassie the dog, it's Charles Manson who's like the family dog. But he's just saying crazy stuff. And Bob Odenkirk does a perfect Charles Manson.

[Chuck]

It's so good. And that's where Ben Stiller started doing the Tom Cruise impressions. And. Yeah. Such a good show. Even though I wasn't into it. We have to talk about. Totally Paulie. Paulie's show ran for five years, so it was actually a pretty big hit.

[Josh]

The Wii's.

[Chuck]

Yeah, the Wii's. And then one of my favorites, which got, you know, MTV had such good programming for a while there with these other shows. Liquid television in 1991, 10 years at least, before Adult Swim came on, you could be a kid that was watching this crazy, weird, experimental animation on television.

[Josh]

Yeah, Liquid Television. Right. Did you watch A and Flux?

[Chuck]

I loved Aeon Flux. It was mind blowing.

[Josh]

Yeah. If you've never seen Aeon Flux, this is like a decade before Adult Swim came out. And this was not a time like there weren't such a thing as cartoons for adults. You had to basically watch heavy metal over and over again. Maybe Akira or something like that. This was like a cavalcade, a showcase of adult weird, bizarre, hilarious cartoons. And it's actually where Beavis and Butthead got its start, therefore, where Mike Judge got his start. Aon Flex was super cool. And in addition to just kind of launching some careers, it just laid the groundwork and showed that there's a huge appetite for people who are no longer in high school who really love pot. Maybe acid a little bit and watch TV or willing to stay up late to watch cartoons. This showed that they were out there. Yeah.

[Chuck]

I didn't know until today that the animated show Daria was a spinoff. Of Beavis and Butthead, that Daria was a character briefly on that show until you pointed that out.

[Josh]

Yeah. She was one of their classmates at high school.

[Chuck]

Yeah. So Daria was big. We can't, you know, we're running so long. We can't, like, dive into all these. But we have to at least mention shows like Jackass and Cribs and then the birth of reality TV eventually with stuff like the Osbournes and Jersey Shore and Punk'd. But it all got started in 1992 with the real World, which, I mean, clearly. I mean, there was the 70s PBS show in American Family, but as far as the teenagers watching stuff, reality tv, I feel like was birthed with the Real World.

[Josh]

Yeah. And you can make a case. My hypothesis is that you can trace pretty much every problem that we have with the world today back to reality TV and ergo, back to the Real World.

[Chuck]

That show was really good for a while. I will stand. I stand behind the Real World. I don't remember what season. I feel like it really jumped the shark, But I know that there are a lot of people that say it was the year that they. Somebody got in the shower with somebody else and it became really just sort of like people were getting on there just because they knew they could be famous. But I feel like it had a more pure intent before that as a kind of a weird social experiment.

[Josh]

Yeah, no, it wasn't the show itself that was problematic. It was the foundation that it created, the legacy it created.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh]

If you like reality tv, great. Good on you. I'm glad that it's out there for you. But it wrecked TV until the streamers came along. Like, if you liked a written, scripted show, ts for you. Because everyone went all in on reality for years and years and years. You had to basically get a subscription to HBO to watch, like, a decent TV show for a long time because reality TV got so popular and it was so cheap to make.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. I don't want people to get mad if we don't mention Carson Daly and trl. This was in the sort of days where I was fading out of mtv, so I wasn't as into it. But Carson Daly did a fine job on Total Request Live. And I'm also a big fan of the great Dave Holmes, who's a really good dude in real life and does some great things these days.

[Josh]

Was he on Total Request Live?

[Chuck]

Yeah. I don't know if he took over for Carson Daly or sort of pinch hit or sometimes, but I know he was definitely One of the hosts.

[Josh]

So a lot of people are like, what's this MTV you're talking about? And there's a good reason for that. And the reason why is because MTV just started to die. A thousand deaths by new channels and networks coming on like it would made a big decision when it went to half hour shows or non music shows even in part because as was explained later, if you are watching MTV in its original form, you're like, you have no control whatsoever on what's going to come up next. And I remember doing this quite clearly. You'd be watching a perfectly good Winger video and then all of a sudden comes, I don't know, some terrible video. I'm not going to call it anybody's favorite artist. And you would just immediately turn the channel because you knew you could turn back in three minutes and see what else was next. And they just got bled by that. And they found that half hour shows kept you in longer. And if those shows weren't made up of music videos, but an actual narrative, over the course of a half an hour, they lost less and less viewers. And so it just became sensible for them to get away from music. But. But fear not, because they said, if you still want music videos, don't worry, we will have you covered for the rest of your life with MTV2.

[Chuck]

That's right. MTV2 launched in 1996. It was like, hey, it's just gonna be music videos. We pinky swear.

[Josh]

Trust us.

[Chuck]

Less than 10 years later, it was mostly reality shows and not music videos. YouTube really sealed the fate because you could just watch any music video ever by just typing it in your search bar on YouTube.

[Josh]

Like Gangnam Style.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And yeah, I mean I watch music videos. There's still a show. I can't remember what it's called that I see on Hulu that just runs music video. So I'll put that on sometimes if I'm like folding laundry.

[Josh]

Okay.

[Chuck]

For nostalgia.

[Josh]

It's kind of nice if you go on MTV. It's still around. I believe MTV2 is still around too. There is a 98.675% chance that you will find an episode of Ridiculousness playing. Yeah, it's been. It carries MTV almost single handedly. It's a. It's a show where they just basically put together hilarious clips. It's like, it's like America's Funniest Home Videos for nihilists and skateboarders basically. Right?

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And it's a good little show. You remember our friend Hampton Youth who was in one of Our variety shows in la.

[Chuck]

That's the only reason I know about Ridiculousness.

[Josh]

Yep. He was one of the writers on Ridiculousness. It's a cute little show, but it has propped up MTV so much that it's been on for 14 years, since 2011, yet somehow it is in season 45.

[Chuck]

Wow.

[Josh]

That's how many episodes they crank out to keep MTV going. So hats off to Rob Drydeck.

[Chuck]

It's the house hunters of mtv.

[Josh]

Yeah, essentially, for sure.

[Chuck]

Well, before we leave, I do want to quickly kind of mention the MTV contests. If you were a kid in the 80s, they had these crazy, crazy contests that you could enter. And they always seemed to kind of want to one up the last as far as what they would do. And they were. I mean, it was like, you know, you can win Bon Jovi's childhood home. You can win a pink house from John Mellencamp or John Cougar at the time and his small town or whatever, but they were crazy. There was one very famous story of the van, like, party with van Halen for two days. And this was in 1984. And this. I was about to say, poor guy. It's probably the best thing that ever happened to him. This guy named Kurt Jeffries has a legendary story of. Basically, they took it seriously. They weren't like, hey, let's just kind of get this kid in here and whatever sign something. Like, they partied with him. They got him drunk and gave him cocaine and got a groupie to have sex with him in a bathroom. And he did the whole Rockstar thing. Van Halen was very intent. Apparently he woke up on day two and was like, I can't. I've got to go home. And Alex Van Halen was, like, shoving a beer in his face and was like, you've got to do this, dude.

[Josh]

He said, you can't leave the spot until you drink that beer. And it was a tall boy. Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say after you rattled all that off, that that was just day one.

[Chuck]

Yeah, that was day one. There was a day two.

[Josh]

And this was a sponsored contest by mtv.

[Chuck]

Yeah, there's no way you could do that stuff these days, obviously, but they had a bunch of those, like, you know, party with the band. I know that the police had a sort of a disaster of a contest where they were supposed to fly on their private jet with the band. And I think that went all pear shaped. I remember very clearly Madonna had a. A contest that you at home could make the video for True Blue. And I just remember seeing, like, bad homemade video after bad homemade video of True Blue over and over and over again just so I could vote via phone. Yeah, the contest. Those are a lot of fun. They're a lot more kind of fun ones. There's kind of a cool Page Six article that covers some of the wackier contests they had.

[Josh]

Yeah, it's definitely worth reading. Thanks for sending that to me. Oh, Chuck, you got anything else?

[Chuck]

No, I mean, we missed a ton, so it's just kind of one of those episodes we tried to stuff as much as we could in here.

[Josh]

Yep. And keep an ear out for VH1, which should be following this one right after, right?

[Chuck]

Yeah. I say we skip listener mail even it's been so long, and just say, go with God. Go watch some music videos.

[Josh]

Yeah, everybody's tired. Take the day off, Everybody. Yeah, exactly. If you want to send us an email, you can send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Chuck]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast.