World’s Strangest

MTV turns 31 today. It launched one minute past midnight on August 1, 1981, with footage of Space Shuttle Columbia and Apollo 11 launches, then the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” spoken by John Lack, one of the creators of MTV. An extended version of the MTV theme riff played, and [...]

Have you ever wished for a way to filter through all the crap on YouTube and find the music videos you’re craving in a world devoid of music television? (MTV is clearly no longer about the music, thanks guys). Well, the makers of Tubalr want to help, and their service will make cutting through the nonsense, [...]

I love Pete & Pete, but this great MTV article has a lot of good points about how the show inspired one of the biggest trends of the last ten years. It makes sense too. After all, most of today’s hipsters grew up watching the show, sucking in its tacky fashions and deeper idiosyncrasies. Link

On August 1, 1981, MTV launched at 12:01am. Below you can see the first hour of MTV, in six ten-minute chunks. It’s historically interesting for the commercials, shows a surprisingly seat-of-the-pants approach to cable TV complete with lots of dead air and bad audio cuts, and features a surprising mix of videos. Oh, and they [...]

In this four-minute clip from 1995, the intrepid MTV News team takes on The Internet. Their coverage is wonderfully dated, showing the state of the art at the time: animated GIFs, Netscape, CompuServe, and blurred-out nudie pictures. Yes indeed, the coverage is primarily about online porn (this is MTV, after all), though a few nods [...]

Parents probably recognize Mo Willems as the animator and writer behind the award-winning Pigeon series of books. What they probably don’t know is that he played a role in the formation of one of the most beloved sketch comedy troupes of the 1990s. When Willems first arrived at New York University in the late 1980s, he [...]