Video Killed A Radio Star

[Gothampc]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 8:39pm

Happy 30th Birthday MTV!

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 8:47pm

Too bad it didn't kill the Tea Party.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 9:42pm

I remember watching when that first video aired. GOD, I'm old.


I still love this song, too.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 10:21pm

After 30 years, I just realized I've been singing this song wrong. It's video killed THE radio star. Not A radio star. The last 30 years of my life have been wasted.

[Calvin]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 10:30pm

If you missed it, VH1 Classic played the original first hour (commercials and all!) at midnight last night. I was a mere lad of not-quite-3 when it launched, and we didn't have cable anyway, but it was cool to see anyway. BTW, the second video ever played on MTV? Pat Benatar's "You Better Run."

[SNAFU]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 10:35pm

MTV sucks, it outsources all its billing work to India. F that hire American, help put people to work here!

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 10:36pm

Were you living in northern New Jersey at the time, best12bars?

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 8/1/11 at 11:55pm

We didn't have cable, but my grandparents did. I remember my cousins and I constantly flipping back and forth between channels since MTV was not allowed at the time.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 6:53am

"Were you living in northern New Jersey at the time, best12bars?"

Nope. I was living in Kansas, going to college at KU. We were all excited there because a guy from KU was one of the founders of MTV, so it was his "baby" being born on cable.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 10:53am

Memory can be a tricky thing. You're probably recalling an anniversary special that rebroadcast the first hour of the network premiere. Only a small number of cable subscribers in Northern New Jersey had access to MTV when it first went on the air 30 years ago.

[ahhrealmonsters]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 10:57am

I remember when MTV played music.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 10:59am

Officially, the M no longer stands for Music in MTV. The network is just called MTV.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 11:00am

I don't honestly recall the date when we watched it, so that may be right. What I remember is that it was an "event" with a bunch of us college kids gathered around a TV to watch the channel "launch."

I saw Video Killed the Radio Star, and stayed with it for another hour or so. I remember thinking they wouldn't be able to sustain the format on an ongoing basis (what did I know?), and that it was a curious novelty that was kinda cool. I don't remember if it was exactly August 1st, but it was a special deal because of the KU connection, and everybody wanted to see a former student (I don't think he even graduated) launch a new cable channel. And it was my freshman year, which was 1981-82.

The rest is mostly a blur, because it was thirty years ago.

That's all I remember, honestly. If it wasn't the very first broadcast, it sure seemed like it, and everybody around acted like it.

Updated On: 8/2/11 at 11:00 AM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 11:48am

It's not like MTV never showed The Buggles video again. The original VJs had to go over to New Jersey to watch the network when it first started, because that was the only area that had it. According to Wikipedia's listing, there were only a few thousand homes that had access to MTV when it came on the air.

Our magical human memories. A lot of people have vivid memories of seeing the JFK assassination live on TV as it happened. The motorcade wasn't actually broadcast on TV, and the Zapruder film was never shown to the public until 1969.

This sort of stuff becomes part of the cultural DNA, and our tricky memories turn us into Forest Gumps, present and accounted for at major events throughout our lives.

Two years later they were still doing ads to try to get cable systems to pick up MTV

Updated On: 8/2/11 at 11:48 AM

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 12:09pm

If I had been an MTV junkie, I think I would be more inclined to agree that I was way off in my recollection. As it stands, I think I'm only "slightly" off. I didn't watch MTV regularly at all, so it was an event for me to watch this launch. I remember the static image of the lunar landing on the screen for days before they started up. Then they did an official countdown (missile launch) before they went on the air. So it was a launch of something. Would they have gone to such lengths to do that when it went into a wider market? If so, maybe that's it.

Also, I'm sure we were one of the early markets to get MTV, being a college town (an ideal market) and one of the colleges that a founder of the channel attended. Since I don't recall the exact date, I can't be sure when it was. Early in my freshman year. But we're talking about a few months difference at best, not years.

[SonofMammaMiaSam]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 12:11pm

Which makes me wonder how I ever saw MTV. I lived in NC in 1981 and didn't have cable, but I know I spent lots of time watching Nina, Martha, Mark and the gang. I must have had friends who had cable or watched it in the employee lounge at work.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 12:26pm

Found some info on it. His name was David Booth.

"Prior to joining Foxtel, Mr. Booth was President of UIH Programming (now United Global Communications), and Managing Director and Chief Executive of Maxwell Entertainment. Mr. Booth was responsible for the launch of MTV Europe as its founding Chief Executive. In addition, he was part of the original MTV Networks management team in America."

http://www.kuathletics.com/facilities/booth-family-hall.html

I'm sure that's who I'm thinking of. By the way, he's still senior vp of marketing & programming at MTV. He graduated from KU with a bachelors and masters degree.

[JohnBoy2]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 12:43pm

Actually, video did kill a radio star. His name is Christopher Cross.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 12:54pm

Well, and many others who didn't have enough visual appeal for this new music format.

That's the only other reaction I remember having. It was pretty negative. I kept thinking that people would no longer use their imaginations when listening to pop music. Instead they would be told (or rather shown) what to think and feel while the music played. Even when they heard it later on without the video, they would very likely conjure up the images of the video, rather than using their own imaginations.

Listening to music would never be the same. And I didn't like that aspect of it.

I found someone else in Omaha, NE, who also recalls watching the "launch" of MTV, with the whole countdown and everything. She was a college student at the time, too. She thinks it was August 1st (that much I don't remember).

I don't know exactly what I'm remembering, but this tells me I'm not the only one remembering it.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-148937150.html

Maybe it was a collective hallucination implanted by aliens on August 1, 1981. We all saw the same thing, and then we had to go climb a mountain with a flattop haircut and wait for the Martians to land!

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 1:00pm

Sight tangent, but tied in:

I worked for Second City for a while when they lived and died in Los Angeles (actually at the old Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica). I was their box office manager, but they also knew I was an actor. They yanked me out of the box office one day to read with all the people who were called back for their touring company. And I got to read with Martha Quinn that morning. I remember even then being a little star-struck before we read. She was so nice (and incredibly petite). She did well, but didn't make the cut.

[javero]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 9:42pm

"I remember watching when that first video aired. GOD, I'm old."

Me too & seeing that it's my birthday and all, I feel especially old.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 8/2/11 at 11:53pm

Were YOU living in Northern New Jersey?

[javero]

Posted: 8/3/11 at 5:04am

"Were YOU living in Northern New Jersey?"

Several of my classmates and I were rising seniors in high school who were being recruited by Rutgers right around the time the network launched. We spent a week and a half on the main campus receiving a high-powered sales pitch from faculty and students alike. Funny thing is that when I returned to my rural hometown in eastern NC, no one back home believed me at the time that such a video channel existed.

If memory serves, MTV was picked up by my cable operator before I got my first Internet account from Prodigy. So much has changed since that launch including the virtual non-existence of many of the cable operators that were around in the early 80s. In fact, I don't even remember the name of my cable provider back then because there have been several acquisitions leading to Team Comcast conquering all.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 8/4/11 at 4:00pm

My family didn't get cable until the late 80s, so if we wanted to watch anything cool, my brother and I had to go to Jenny and Julie's house. I think the first music videos I saw on MTV were Safety Dance and Don't Pay the Ferryman.

But the first music videos I ever saw were those of ABBA in the late 70s on Laser Disc.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/4/11 at 6:09pm

I remember a lot of pre-MTV videos on shows like "The Midnight Special."

The late '70s had a lot of them: Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, Twilight Zone by Manhattan Transfer.

Most of them just involved funky video camera effects and animated "star fields" and a lot of video color bleed. LOL High tech for back then.

Updated On: 8/4/11 at 06:09 PM