MTV turns 30

regdog

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VH1 Classics has been airing the original programming from MTV since it started. It's been pretty cool to watch the old videos and shows. Back in the day when MTV was still cool and the music mattered.
 

Chris P

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I still love good music videos. Thank god for Youtube!
 

regdog

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No kidding. MTV never plays them anymore, now they're more a junk channel with that Jersey Shore crap
 

Chris P

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I remember when MTV was first available in our area (not until about 1983) my dad asked my brother and I how we didn't get bored just sitting there watching the same videos over and over.

I didn't get bored of them then, and I still don't. Of course, with Youtube I can delete the boring ones off my playlist and go look for new ones.
 

regdog

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My Dad loved MTV when it first came on. I just made us both a bunch of CDs with all those songs.
 

KimJo

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I was 11 years old when MTV first went on the air. A few years later, my father entered an MTV contest and won a copy of Van Halen's album 1984. I was the cool kid for a little while; I had a parent who actually watched MTV. LOL
 

Manuel Royal

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Takes me back to when I was 20. MTV became the channel to have on for background entertainment while you were doing something else. Any thirty seconds you happened to be looking at it was likely to be as good as any other thirty seconds.
 

Jersey Chick

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My mother refused to get cable until the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, which was the summer of '89. I was a deprived child.

But I do have fond memories of hanging out at my best friend's house and watching videos. :D
 

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I grew up in the nineties and MTV did have some great stuff on at that time. I'll always have a special place in my heart for Daria and Beavis and Butthead. It's a shame that the network is now just bad reality shows.
 

BenPanced

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I grew up in the nineties and MTV did have some great stuff on at that time. I'll always have a special place in my heart for Daria and Beavis and Butthead. It's a shame that the network is now just bad reality shows.

Two words: Liquid Television.

"I'm gonna find you, Crow Dickerson, and when I do I'm either gonna love you as hard as a biker chick can or I'm gonna do a wheelie on your face until you die screaming, you son of a b!tch." (Pretty much from memory.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0vghlUn4kM
 
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Jehhillenberg

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COOL! I came in at the ass end of MTV actually showing music videos and being about music as the name implies. My mom is a part of the first MTV generation so she'll be thrilled and it'll be a cool history lesson for me!! :D
 
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glendalough

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I remember when MTV first came on. It's all anyone talked about in school. Now, I wonder...why do musicians even MAKE videos? I know the country singers have a station that plays music, but why does anyone else make them? Youtube crowd??
 

BenPanced

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The Village Voice has obtained a copy of the contract signed by participants in The Real World.

You pretty much literally sign your life away for a mere pittance of $300 a week and a flat fee of $750 for any book or video releases related to the show.

And if you're maimed or killed, you hold them harmless. If you become pregnant on the show, you're immediately dismissed. And they don't have to conduct background checks on anybody else and if they do, they're under no obligation to share the results. And you can't hide in buildings where they can't film just to get away from them for 5 minutes. And you deserve whatever you get for signing this thing without reading it.
 

Jehhillenberg

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The Village Voice has obtained a copy of the contract signed by participants in The Real World.

You pretty much literally sign your life away for a mere pittance of $300 a week and a flat fee of $750 for any book or video releases related to the show.

And if you're maimed or killed, you hold them harmless. If you become pregnant on the show, you're immediately dismissed. And they don't have to conduct background checks on anybody else and if they do, they're under no obligation to share the results. And you can't hide in buildings where they can't film just to get away from them for 5 minutes. And you deserve whatever you get for signing this thing without reading it.


Psh, that's not worth $300 a week to me. The important of reading a contract.
 

Shadow_Ferret

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Wasn't the Real World the first reality show? So back then they probably thought, "Well, it's $300 for doing nothing and I get to be on TV." Who knew it would mark the beginning of one of the most abhorrent genres in television?
 

BenPanced

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When you get right down it, though, many "firsts" attributed to MTV were innovations from others. People thought music videos were invented solely for MTV, but since the advent of sound motion pictures, studios were producing musical shorts to fill out their theaters' programs. In fact, Warner Brothers created Merrie Melodies and Looney Toons because of their extensive music catalog. Bettie Boop had several episodes that were just animated music videos. And during the 40's through the late 60's, coin-operated Panorams showed Soundies and many bars on both sides of the Atlantic featured Scopitone players. Then before The Real World, there was the PBS documentary series An American Family, a series that had cameras following the Loud family of Eugene, Oregon. The show ended with Pat asking her husband Bill to move out and grant her a divorce.

But an entire network? The closest the US had before that were blocks of music videos shown on HBO or Showtime between movies. MTV took the format of An American Family and rather than showing a family living together and disintegrating, they chose to throw strangers together into a house.

And now, that's all that MTV seems to show: "reality" shows. Their original namesake, the music video, is still shown on the network but usually between 1:00 AM and 6:00 AM. The spin-off networks, MTV Hits and MTV Tr3s, currently play more music than the original flagship. Lately, the closest connection to music many of the shows on MTV is there's a crawl at the bottom of the screen to let you know the name of the song playing in the background and who's singing it.