This weekend, MTV celebrated it's 30th birthday (August 1) by re-airing it's initial broadcast as it appeared on that very day. For someone who was only born a year and 14 days after the network, watching the initial first hour was more than just a look into television history, but a video snapshot of the world in 1981.
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| Who took this picture? The photographer for The A-Team? |
As the screen-crawl warned, the first hour included "technical difficulties" in the form of a black screen with some occasional slipping of the vertical hold on the tapes. Between the actual videos and the off-sequence VJ segments, the occasional commercial would play. I revisited moments in time such as the revolutionary sound-reducing Dolby recording cassette tapes to a trailer for the "new" movie "Superman II". And (of course) an atari commercial. Along with these products were some ads that would've been lost to history if not for the master tapes: Andron cologne by Jovan and
Chewels candies .
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| Can cologne improve with age? |
Aside from my comments, the footage was not completely disconnecting. The public access-style video quality that was standard up to the early 90s all but took me back to the days before fiber optics. I found myself again absorbed into to dimension that is MTV. A dimension that lay just through the 32 inch Sony in the basement.
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| If it's got this sticker, it's from the 80s! |
I could never know what it was like to be an early 80s teenager and search high and low for just to see that new music channel everyone's talking about. The closest I could ever come to empathy is remembering my own reaction when I learned that there would be a
24 hour cartoon channel.
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| We're right behind you, MTV....... |
Wanting more I found a yotube page of the first 24 hours (not just 1) of the MTV launch:
http://www.youtube.com/profileannotation_id=annotation_652189&user=MTVTheFirst24&feature=iv#p/p
