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Best of Original Cartoons: MTV: Music Television 1981-1983

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

MTV ID Collection 1 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

MTV ID Collection 2 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The first professional animations I was involved with were with my first job in TV, the very first of dozens of 10 second network identifications for MTV during the channel's launch years. (You can read the background on the MTV logo here, and about other work I did for the channel over the years here.)

In the year before we went on the air for the first time I asked my boss whether we were going to have jingles, like commercial radio.

“NO!” Well, what then? “How about we animate our logo?” Which, by the way we didn’t have yet. “Think about an animated cow. Then a giant axe chops it’s head off. The head falls to the ground with the veins and blood oozing out. The cow vomits. And in the vomit is our logo!”

Oh, you mean, we can do anything we want. It was a great way to start a television career.

PS: From 1981 until 1992, Alan Goodman, my creative partner, and I were responsible for almost 1000 10-second network “branding” animations for MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Nick-at-Nite, Lifetime, The Movie Channel, and Comedy Central, among others. Alan had gone to film school, but these pieces were the beginning of my understanding how to tell stories with moving pictures. Why 10-seconds? It’s true that traditional broadcasting identities were generally 2-5 seconds, and were more like the “motion graphics” that are used even today. But, there were technical limitations at MTV Networks’ network operations center that didn’t allow videos shorter than nine seconds to be played. A 10 second film was too long to make the logo wiggle in space, so we took to developing pieces that had beginnings, middles, and ends, a story “arc.” For an ID, the story was what our channel stood for, a visual representation of the “personality” we wanted to convey. Alan and I looked at them as if they were moving “album covers” (we were originally a music channel, after all) and vinyl Long Players were the graphic innovations of our times.

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MTV Creative Director: Fred Seibert MTV Producer: Alan Goodman Production companies: Buzzco, NY; (Colossal) Pictures, SF; Broadcast Arts, Washington DC; Jerry Lieberman, NY; Eli Noyes, NY; Tom Pomposello , NY.