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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 14, 2020 18:15:17 GMT -5
those are the guys... I really thought that were from the Crofts... they had a show that was set in a bar, too, but maybe I'm wrong. Liquid Television I was too young for at the time.. love Aeon Flux though (I have a DVD set of it somewhere around here) Sid & Marty Krofft produced DC Follies, which was an attempt at an American version of Spitting Image, with puppet caricatures. It was set in a bar, with Fred Willard as the barman... One of the writers, Jeff Zimmer, was also a writer for Not Necessarily the news, which was the American version of Britain's Not the 9 O'Clock News as was Steve Barker. Spitting Image pre-dated it by 3 years and was massive in the UK, delivering heavy doses of satire about Thatcher, the Royal Family, politicians, celebrities, Reagan, Gorbachev (and predecessors) and whoever else was a topic. One of the chief voice artists was Chris Barries, who would go on to play Rimmer, in Red Dwarf and Gordon Brittas in the sit-com The Brittas Empire. The show was instigated by an ITV producer who wanted to do a satirical show and who had seen plasticine caricatures that a pair of Cambridge School of Art veterans, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, had created. They created the puppets, with designs from cartoonists and caricaturists. After initial run, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor came in as head writers and it really took off, to where it was as much a topic of conversation as SNL sketches were, in the original 5 years. Grant & Noylor created Red Dwarf, which is how Barrie became involved in it, their having worked with him. The Reagan puppet you see in Land of Confusion is the design they used throughout Spitting Image and they created the puppet of Genesis. Spitting Image actually produced a special for NBC, but they dragged their feet about airing it, before they finally did, in 1986. Ratings weren't great, but critics loved it and they did several more, including the Ron and Nancy Show,. As far as the video for Land of Confusion, Phil Collins saw a Spitting Image version of himself, on the show and commissioned Fluck and Law to create the puppets for the video. Chris Barrie voices Reagan in the video. There were other music video parodies that American MTV viewers didn't understand. The Queen video for "I Want to Break Free" is a parody of the characters in the long running soap opera Coronation Street; but, it isn't shown here, so they just saw the band in drag and assumed it was all about gender swap. People also assumed it was Freddy's idea (it was drummer Roger Taylor's idea and he was the most decidedly feminine looking of the bunch, in costume). The German band Propaganda had a song, Mabuse, that was a tribute to Norbert Jacques' Dr Mabuse, made popular in Frintz Lang's 3 films with the character (and a 1960s German series, by other hands), but few in the US knew anything about it (or saw it, as the only Propaganda song I ever saw on MTV was "Duel"). Phil Collins parodied several videos and films with "Don't Lose My Number," including various westerns, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the Police's "Every Breath You Take," David Lee Roth's "California Girls," Kurosawa (or samurai films, in general), and The Cars "You Might Think." |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2020 0:45:21 GMT -5
From a 1983 interview with David Bowie on MTV by Mark Goodman. Bowie turns the tables and asks some hard questions about MTV's early playlists and musical choices. Their format would later change of course with things like Yo! MTV Raps, but these types of conversations are just as relevant today as they were 37 years ago...
-M
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Post by brianf on Jun 21, 2020 3:27:19 GMT -5
MTV had a long history of banning vids Strangely enough, since I didn't have cable TV at home until the 1990s, the first video I remember seeing on MTV was when I was visiting my friend Matts house in the early 80's - he had cable and I saw a weird video by Triumph where the band is flying though space on a giant Flying V guitar, they wake up a sleeping lady and make her dance. Such a dumb video, it's stuck in my head. |
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Post by rberman on Jun 21, 2020 6:54:42 GMT -5
As well they should have. They were a subsidiary of a major media company, and their goal was to get as many cable companies as possible to carry their network, and as many homes as possible tuning in. That's going to involve content curation along various axes including musical quality, video quality, song subject matter, video subject matter, etc. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 21, 2020 12:24:50 GMT -5
As well they should have. They were a subsidiary of a major media company, and their goal was to get as many cable companies as possible to carry their network, and as many homes as possible tuning in. That's going to involve content curation along various axes including musical quality, video quality, song subject matter, video subject matter, etc. Except their criteria was arbitrary and it had the effect of banning most artists of color and many that were banned due to political content, rather than sexual suggestion or violence. Queen's "Body Language" was not allowed because of dancers with arrows drawn on limbs, pointing in different directions, but not to sexual organs; yet, Madonna did everything but masturbate in videos (saved that for the stage)...... Arbitrary. Madonna was in, Queen was out, since they hadn't toured in the US for quite a while (especially since US mainstream radio seemed hostile to them adapting). What got on had more to do with who bribed MTV execs (including a story told in their "oral history" book, which featured an "oral" act" to get the video shown), one way or another. Violence was allowed, sexually provocative acts were allowed.....so long as you were a band or singer with some power to get your stuff shown. Attacks on consumerism and greed culture? Not unless you are a big name artist, with a lot of media muscle. Gay themes? Only if the video is buried in the late hours, in most cases. |
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