Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for July 27, 2009

Yeah, kiddies, once upon a time MTV had rock videos….

The early years were enjoyable.

Those of us of a certain vintage will immediately recognize the second panel as a takeoff on the ads for Maxell cassettes. Imagine that - they were larger than an MP3 player and you could only fit 90 minutes of music on one.

remember the image, very well.

Yeah, Michael Jackson had to die before MTV would show videos again. He was the King of the video era, too. I sure miss the videos. They turned me on to a lot of great music.

Thanks for the link, baslim_the_begger!

Funny how MTV started as a music video outlet, playing videos nearly 24 hours a day, interrupted periodically with music news or other music-related shows.

Now, with all the bleeep they play that has nothing to do with music, their initials “MTV” should now stand for “Mindless Television” instead of “Music Television.”

I have friends who have stopped watching MTV altogether, all because they don’t play enough videos anymore.

I don’t have any idea what their marketing strategy was for getting away from the music, but apparently whatever it is must be working for them.

Sigh. What a waste of a perfectly good cocktail.

I stopped watching MTV 20 years ago, & got bored with Michael twice that. Sent Viacom an irate e-mail saying “I want my MTV back. 24 hour music!” Non-responsive.

I didn’t like MTV from its very inception. I can’t name one good thing in principle that came out of it, save for the concept of the music video as such.

And I can probably count on one hand the number of cassettes I’ve owned (out of thousands) that ever had any fatal mechanical problems. All they needed was a minimal amount of preventative care, like a book.

That said, iTunes and iPod Touch have finally got to me. How sweet it is to go walking with my favorite music (some of it original) in my ears! :)

I can’t even watch anymore. Too many reality shows.

I’d rather be with Blinkley in the meadow back in the ’80s agains

The 60’s is where we started to go wrong as a society [I’ve always blamed it on the Beatles, but maybe it was really Jerry and the Grateful Dead] and by the 80’s we were hopelessly lost. Now, we are too mind numb to even watch videos and the government is programming us to be their automatons in anticipation of the anti-Christ. Can Armageddon be that far away?

I fondly remember staying up for “Friday Night Videos.” Also, it wasn’t very long ago that MHz featured music videos on a regular basis.

At least there’s YouTube.

Sadly, both VH1 and MTY are too wrapped up in reality shows. Ocaissonally, VH1 Classics will show something that actually has music.

Empty Vee - Launching an entire decade of music that was style over substance. I graduated High School in ‘84 and even hated it at the time. All those stupid doinky sounding new wave records, the artificial sounding snare drums, the bad vocals, the insipid lyrics. Good riddance.

There were exceptions, but they were few: Tom Petty, John Cougar Mellencamp and other bands that just played their instruments and told a story. Some of the Euro-pop was style AND substance and I liked Oingo Boingo as well - it was the Boingo knockoffs that were really irritating though.

Need I mention the hair bands?

These days it just looks like a long commercial to indoctrinate kids into the religions of global warming and crass materialism.

Funny - I STILL have an old VHS tape that I had recorded some of the music videos on MTV that I liked at the time - remember the MTV video of “And I Go Insane”, with Lindsey Buckingham? It also has Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” video, the original Dire Straits “Money For Nothing” plus a number of others that caught my eye back in those long-ago days. Ah, the magic of a front-loading VCR, instead of a top loader (ask your grandparents, kids).

MTV’s appeal is showing early 20 year old jack a$$e$ to 14 to 17 year old wannabe jack a$$e$ who can’t wait till they’re old enough to drink and act like that. (Without having to work, because somehow the reality of needing a lot of money to have endless fun escapes most of the stories.)

News Flash: MTV and Viacom are now programed by closet Republicans.

And yes, Fiteflyr50, MTV killed the Video Star.

Good news though-there’s a great opportunity for anyone willing to start a network featuring music videos.

still have lots of hair. it’s just that most of it’s on my chin now - and it decided to change colour when i wasn’t looking.

Man do I remember those commercials. Nice to see that Bloom County is giving a nostalgic nod to them.