moth:

The first ten minutes of MTV.

From Wikipedia:

On August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., MTV: Music Television launched with the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,”spoken by John Lack. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching guitar riff written by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over a montage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. With the flag having a picture of MTVs logo on it. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a conceit, associating MTV with the most famous moment in world television history. Seibert said they had originally planned to use Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” quote, but lawyers said Armstrong owns his name and likeness, and Armstrong had refused, so the quote was replaced with a beeping sound. At the moment of its launch, only a few thousand people on a single cable system in northern New Jersey could see it.

Weirdest part for me is Adam Curry’s line at the end: “combining the best of TV with the best of radio.” There’s been a line in Next New Networks’ materials since we began: “combining the best of TV with the best of the web.” No coincidence that Fred was involved with both.

I rarely reblog here, but this clip seemed like a good bet. (Though that last VJ was actually Mark Goodman.)

You'll never look at music the same way again.

MTV: The Making of a Revolution, written by Tom McGrath

By the mid-1990s, a teenager who’d had his mind blown by the music video visual feast was old enough to be a damn good writer and reporter, so Scranton’s Tom McGrath (now the Executive Editor of Philadephia Magazine) decided to literally write the book. MTV: The Making of a Revolution told the whole story (it’s sadly now out of print, maybe since MTV: Music Television has become MTV) behind and in front of the camera.

As I remember, Mr. McGrath’s reporting was fairly complete and, all in all, accurate, in and of itself often a rarity in media reporting. He made me and the work my teams did look good, which made my mother and father very happy. Me too.

MTV: Music Television, The Logo

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The “first MTV logo, designed by Manhattan Design


The mutating MTV logo, 1981, designed by Manhattan Design

I was the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television, joining the parent company (then called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company) May 5, 1980. My boss, Bob Pittman asked me to oversee all of the original production and programming for the fledging cable television channel (who had even heard of cable TV as anything other than a service for rural audiences?) though I’d never seen a television camera.

The first job? Establish a vocabulary, “voice,” and look for the thing. The first move? Hire my oldest and best friends, Alan Goodman and Frank Olinsky.

In my MTV office, 1981.                 Photo by Alan Goodman

As far as I can remember, the article below was the first written on the MTV logo (designed by Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky & Patti Rogoff); it’s from June 1982, about 10 months after the network launched.  My favorite part is the illustration of the what was essentially the “first” MTV logo (illustrated above). Notice the section in the article on Nickelodeon was about their redesign, but that was only two years before Alan Goodman and I oversaw a the next change (designed by Tom Corey and Scott Nash) that lasted over 25 years.

(You can read more about my adventures with MTV here or at The Fred/Alan Archive.

New Network Look: Hairy, Fat

The MTV Network IDs.

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Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, MTV IDs 1981-1983 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

From the very first minute I went to work for Bob Pittman (he was 25, I was 27) at the Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company in May of 1980, he told me about the company’s plan for a television channel that would be exclusively rock videos and how he envisioned the TV equivalent of radio jingles: network identifications (‘IDs’) short, wacked out pieces of animation that would reveal the network logo. Not like the staid CBS Eye (“You’re watching CBS.”) but rock’n’roll wrapped up into a little picture explosion.

As soon as we started working on what would become MTV: Music Television a month later I started thinking about these IDs and realized they could be the album covers of the new generation of music fans. For baby boomers the album cover came of age with the first American Beatles album representing every phase of their cultural development. I had bemoaned my lateness to that party, but my self-importance hoped the MTV network IDs could serve the same purpose.

Little did I know they’d achieve an almost equal prominence, and more. For me and Alan Goodman, my first partner in the enterprise (and countless more), they led the way for how we would become the first people to ‘brand’ American cable television networks throughout the 1980s. First as employees at MTV, then for our clients at Fred/Alan, we made over 1000 more of these 10-second visual operas for networks ranging from Nickelodeon and Comedy Central to TMTV in Japan and Lifetime. We worked with some of the greatest indie animators the world had to offer (some we’re still doing projects with today) and started a lot of companies on their way. These IDs might have been the most fun I had during the years we were doing television branding. (And for me, inadvertendly, they began what was to become a late life career change into producing cartoons.)

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More than 75,000 times.

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This post is about two animated spots during MTV’s first year. One’s the most popular, 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. 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 wanted there to be a signal identification at the top and bottom of each and every hour of MTV: Music Television, where the VJ would identify the most important music videos in that half hour. We agreed it would be 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. 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. But we conveniently forgot about that.)

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.

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 it’s job and reflect our conceit, be inexpensive, and use our ever changing logo. Oh right, it had to have that indefinable rock attitude.

I thought 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 moment ever and fold, spindle, and mutilate it to our nefarious purposes.

Our brainstorming turned up some famous, or really infamous, stuff. The biggest one we thought about was the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting by Jack Ruby that was live on television in 1963. Aside from it’s wrongness, it occurred to me that it was only an American moment. We were claiming that MTV would be “the world’s first video music channel.” We needed a world moment.

Right then 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 chocked with walkers looking for apartments with televisions to witness this seemingly impossible achievement of man. Truly, the most memorable worldwide event in TV history.

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.

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 (logos originally designed and illustrated by Manhattan Design), and music was by John Petersen and Jonathan Elias at Elias/Peterson.

By the way, this version of the spot never ran. The day before launch the lawyers informed me we needed, and would never receive, permission from astronaut Neil Armstrong to use his quotation. For launch night only —midnight, August 1, 1981— one of our big bosses did a 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 Mr. Armstrong.

The VMA Moonman

The spot ran more than 75,000 times, through variations of animation and music. Now, it’s sense memory DNA is left in 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. It was only retired, tragically, on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger Shuttle exploded in mid-air. The end of the first space era.

“Freddie Buys It” from fredseibert on Vimeo.

This story’s 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. He asked 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.

"We look before you buy!"

A little known fact about MTV Networks (originally called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, a second little known fact) was that its original strategy called for the eventual launch of ten networks. They thought about games and sports, in addition to music, movies, and kids; their fourth one was to be shopping. As the company’s creative director, my team went to work in the Spring of 1982.

Before Home Shopping Network there was to be ShopAmerica, the world’s first all shoppping TV channel. After all, the half owner of the company was American Express; that’s why they invested in cable television, after all.

There are a lot of network development levels that are too boring to go into (and the minute HSN launched it was clear how our strategy would have failed), but since I’ve always loved working on logos and branding I hung onto our attempts for ShopAmerica. George Lois and my mentor, Dale Pon, art directed for their agency LPG/Pon.

Not Fred Allen.

Alan Goodman & me. Photography by Elena Seibert,  hand coloring by Candy Kugel, 1983

Alan Goodman and I met at WKCR-FM, our college radio station, in 1970; we’ve been the greatest of friends and collaborators ever since. We tagged team each other on personal work projects for the next 10 years, and Alan was the person I turned to for guidance the night I made the decision to turn away from record production and move into cable TV. Six months later Alan joined me at MTV Networks.

For three years we helped turn the television world upside down and then we’d had enough. In April 1983 we booked the corporate life and set up Fred/Alan, Inc. (figuring all of our clients would have to be old to get the joke). At the start we thought the company would produce TV shows and movies; in fact the precipitating event that caused us to quit our jobs was a deal to make a music video show for The Playboy Channel.

The First TV Branding Company
But the thing that capapulted Fred/Alan was what turned out to be our innovative network branding work for MTV; no one had really thought about television the same way before. In quick succession we were able to develop and launch all the key MTV networks (Nickelodeon, VH-1: Video Hits One, HA! The TV Comedy Network, Comedy Central); and we virtually invented Nick-at-Nite, the very first oldies network). Most successfully, Fred/Alan was able to take Nickelodeon from worst to first in the ratings within six months and established their brand around the world (Alan and I have separately maintained relationships with Nick ever since).

Fred/Alan morphed into a full service advertising agency, adding media buying, print production, and account management to our creative and strategic capabilities. It was the first agency to brand itself as a demographically specialized company.

In 1989 we moved back into television series, setting up Chauncey Street Productions with our old friend Albie Hecht, and went on to produce hundreds of TV episodes for A&E, AMC, CBS, Comedy Central/HA!, MTV, Nickelodeon, and others.

But after a while we couldn’t take it anymore. Our branding approaches had become commodified as our more motivated former employees, the clients we had trained, and every graphic design firm all became media branding experts. We were turning down lucrative offers to buy the company since we knew it would require years more of servitude.

After many years together, Alan married my sister Elena in early 1992, and in February we announced the closing of Fred/Alan. Albie bought Chauncey Street, and Alan went on to become a successful writer/producer.

In June 1992, I became the president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.

(For more about Fred/Alan, check out The Fred/Alan Archive, 1983-1992.)

Photography by Elena Seibert

Nickelodeon.

Nickelodeon Logo Logic Publish at Scribd or explore others: Marketing Business branding logo

Fred/Alan was my agency in partnership with Alan Goodman and we worked with Nickelodeon from 1984 through 1992 as brand, marketing, and programming consults, as their advertising agency, and with Albie Hecht through it’s Chauncey Street Productions subsidiary, as television producers.

Alan Goodman has continued to consult and produce for Nickelodeon. I produce cartoons and consult for the network.