Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.
Buzzco, New York, produced easily MTV’s most famous ID film.
To find the first animation companies to make network identifications for our new music channel, MTV, Alan Goodman and I had looked at 100 commercial reels with only one –from Perpetual Motion Pictures, New York– in our ‘maybe’ pile. But at first we were distracted by the innovative and spot on work from Colossal Pictures and Broadcast Arts. But, one day my mentor Dale Pon had told be about a nice experience he’d had with producer Buzz Potamkin and he might be good to meet. Lo and behold, Buzz was the proprietor of Perpetual, soon to be renamed Buzzco. One conversation and ‘maybe’ turned into ‘sure!’
Of course, first up was our now famous “Top of the Hour” and its successor, the VMA “Moonman.” After all, it was the pivot piece of every MTV hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days every year. And the half hour too! 75,000 times a year.
Director/illustrator/animator Candy Kugel took some of Frank Olinsky’s original logo illustrations, added a few great ones of her own, and directed the f--- out of the constantly mutating ‘M’ so that it was seared into our fans’ brains.
I looked at my mission to be “making the M famous!” so the Top of the Hour (originally titled “One Small Step” for very good reasons) was probably one of the first ways we could accomplish it.
But that was only the beginning. Like us, Buzz had admired the Sesame Street short animations, so we had a good time doing a parody, given that MTV’s format was not dissimilar, and our target viewers had all grown up with the show. The studio also adapted illustration work from Manhattan Design and others. Then in 1983, Buzz produced the very first “I Want My MTV!” commercials that I oversaw, directed by Thomas Schlamme and executive produced by Alan. And soon after, the paint over style they used in subsequent MTV commercials was repurposed for a fresh take on Top of the Hour.
Like these accomplishments weren’t enough, Buzz was critically important in other ways for me. Instrumental in helping Alan and I start our new business, Fred/Alan, he became a partner in our first production, a series for the Playboy Channel, and a mentor.
Buzz patiently answered hundreds of my questions about the cartoon part of the entertainment business with such excitement that when he left the studio to Candy, Vincent Caffarelli and Marilyn Kramer to go West to start his own cartoon studio, he left me juiced enough about cartoon production that I followed a few years later and became the last president of Hanna-Barbera. Buzz joined me immediately as head of production and was instrumental in my getting What A Cartoon!, the pioneering re-booting of cartoon shorts off the ground.
It’s safe to say that without Buzz and Buzzco, MTV could have been much different channel.
Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.
