MTV's 40th Anniversary
 

Was yesterday, and this was their big schedule
https://twitter.com/MTVSchedule/stat...74687945150467

Who wants to watch that all day long?

It's kind of ironic when you realize our parents were part of the MTV generation, the "Me generation" as they called it. Back then they thought young adults watching MTV all day was bad, little did they know about the youtube generation with youtubers and zoomers we would get by the mid/late 2000's.

It goes to prove every generation grows up with something that's deemed "not good for teens/adults" when it starts, and then is looked upon favorably gens later.

40 years, but only 20 years of them actually playing music.

First music video out:

Our parents? Try US. Or at least my generation. Heck, I was there watching the first day it aired! Don't remember if I saw the very first video, but I was home that day and got to see it from day one. Child of the 80's, yo!

Well I was a kid in the 80's, I'm not a 40+ year old yet, so it wasn't part of my gen...thankfully.

yeah, I never understood the "Remember when MTV played music". Well no, I never actually saw that. When I started watching MTV they only had reality shows. For music videos I would go to the web. When was the last time MTV was even relevant? When madonna and britney kissed? what was that 2003? That was the last time I ever heard someone mention the MTV music awards as if they were worth something. When I was in High School MTV had 0 relevance.

I mean are cartoon network and nickelodeon relevant to todays kids? I doubt anything on live tv is too relevant nowadays. Though CN and Nick likely outlasted MTV in terms of relevance.

If you grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, it was definitely part of your generation.

Ironically, I was talking about this with my folks about MTV celebrating its 40th and then reminiscing over how MTV used to be and how it was worth watching after it found its niche. Of course I can't comment on the first few years, but the mid to late 80s I can. IMO, MTV started going downhill in the 90s when they started to add more and more shows to the channel that didn't have much to do with music, like all those reality shows. I give the animated stuff a pass along with Liquid Television. :-P Did anyone else watch Liquid Television? It was weird and we got Aeon Flux from it.Generation X kids are pretty much the MTV generation and even some older "Millenials" or "Xenials" (think that's what you'd call them, not quite X, not quite Millenial) can say they were part of it in some way if they grew up with those around them who did. For me, I grew up with 80s MTV. As far back as I can remember, my family always had cable. I have fond memories watching a lot of MTV, although to be fair, given my age, it's mostly mid-80s where I have more memories. I have some more vague ones prior. It's like Nickelodeon. I do have vague memories of earlier Nickelodeon when they still used the pinball logo...and when I used to watch Pinwheel. lol

I make a point to listen to Martha Quinn's morning show every day when I get up!! Even if it's two hours behind me while other morning shows are still on.

Absolutely.

I mean, the list of some of MTV's most popular shows were in the 90s and early 2000s:

Daria
The Real World
Road Rules
Beavis & Butthead
Total Request Live

Then you had shows like Celebrity Deathmatch and Jackass. If you werent watching ANY of that in that time frame, you werent watching MTV whatsoever.

if you were a teen in the 90s perhaps, no little kid was watching MTV, they weren't the target audience, MTV was not at all popular in the 2000's, it became irrelevant because of the internet except for some reality shows no one remembers.

before someone

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/...65/DpQ9YJl.png

Well yeah, a cable channel will still have an audience, but to be "MTV Generation" that's because it had a huge audience that it influenced the lives of a good chunk of the generation, MTV wasn't doing that in the 2000's, it was the internet. I'm sure that MTV's impact on 90s teenagers was much smaller than it was on 80s teens.

I was a kid in the 80's too, Cubed. I started high school in 1991. It very much WAS your generation as much as mine, hence why I said US.

If you started High School by then you were already an older kid, I was an infant. Even though I was born in the 80's...I'm more of a 90's kid because obviously as a baby you can't do anything.

Gen Xers are always trying to pretend they're millennials the older they get, they got too cocky, they felt they owned the world in the 2000's and kept saying the 90s sucked, but now they're middle aged and antivaxxers.

It's always cringey to see Black Nerd and Pixel Dan try to pretend they understand kids properties from the 90s like power rangers and what not from that era when they were already in teenagers and way past the target audience. Gen X was a mistake, I'll take zoomers any day.

I'm barely 10 years older than you. Born 1976, the tail end of the 70's, I was 3 in 79 when Return of the Jedi came out. I literally grew up IN the 80's, I was only 10 in 87, just about the time TMNT was created. You would have been a kid when MTV first aired, in the heyday of it's popularity. You are part of that generation too, Cubed.

As a side note, while not the "target audience" at its inception, I was old enough to enjoy the music and the videos for their own sake. Kids were always trying to be more mature and "cool" like older kids, and tbh, MTV was hardly purely for adults. Mostly appealed to teens and kids home in summer or younger adults with shows like MTV Beach House and Spring Break, or Yo MTV Raps, but the music was all-ages, for the most part.

You and your "agism" posts.... :lol:

I never wanted to be associated as a millenial. I'm not - I'm firmly "squeaked" into Gen X, but... I'm good with it, man.

I've never understood Power Rangers to be honest. Never. I remember watching it in high school a few times and thinking "how could anyone take this seriously or be fooled by it's quality?" I mean... Power Rangers was like 1 degree away from being "Barney n Friends" but with Kung-Fu. :o

But.... you know.... there are people who deeply love it, so..... it clearly has staying power.

I guess CN is for kids that love TTG and Nick for kids that love SpongeBob.

I was living Mexico at the time, they played mostly played music videos, top tens, and eventually Beavis and Butt-Head and South Park. MTV unplugged was live performances from the stars at the time. There were also like half hour shows about the latest musician gossip, who's dating who and whatnot. But a good chunk was still nonstop videos.

I watched it religiously from 1991 through 1996 but after that it took a sharp downhill slide.

Liquid Television was the sh*t, yo. And reruns of Speed Racer at like 1am.

Early 2000s MTV was good with the actual good shows they were showing. It's the Jersey Shore era that killed it for good.

It’s true MTV is not as good as it was but I gotta be honest...I love watching Ridiculousness. Seeing all the crazy videos and Rob, Steelo and Chanel’s banter makes me laugh. I find it relaxing.

I started watching these marathon blocks last year. The early seasons are forced and too rapid-fire. They really clicked around 2015 according to the date (whatever season that was). They’re better without celebrity guests. Some are good but a lot are annoying or don’t fit.

Deliciousness with Tiffani, Kel, Angela and Tim is also cool. They reuse some of the videos but they’re funny too.

Adorableness is ok and Messyness, which hasn’t aired yet, looks fine but it’s based on the “party/drunk” theme. The videos are entertaining (I’m sure they’ll reuse some) but I’m not into that at all.

MTV has been dead to me for a long time.

Clone High was the last show on MTV that I found worth my time.

Loved Aeon Flux. The Head and The Maxx were cool too.

Even though I wasn't alive when MTV was at its prime, I still want to experience the culture around it.

It sounds like it had good programming.

It did, in the beginning. That meme going around about 14 years of music is fairly accurate. Up until the mid 90s, when it was taken over by reality shows and other crap.

I used to watch some VH-1 a few years ago.

Love Aeon Flux too. I have the DVD box set here for years but have never gotten all the way through it.... lmao! Crazy.

It's funny, because MTV definitely pioneered the whole "Reality TV" deal with "The Real World" and "Road Rules", they were insanely popular and essentially created an entire new way of doing TV that would go on to dominate the early-2000s (and still has a lingering impact today). So you can't deny that.

But on the other hand... I remember trying to watch "The Real World", because everyone else did, and I was SO not into it, and in the back of my mind I was like, "This is the show that's gonna screw everything up for MTV." It wasn't a big deal at first, but once they started doing marathons that covered an entire weekend the writing was on the wall. Like imagine being a kid who's actually into music and music videos - don't laugh, it was actually incredibly common back then - but your TV watching during the week was limited, so you'd look forward to finally having all weekend to catch up on some MTV... and they're playing Real World non-stop instead. That was super annoying, and it got more and more common as the 90s went on.

Another thing was when they f*cked up the Top 20 countdown. That used to be a huge thing, and then little by little they whittled it down. Originally, they played all 20 videos in full; then, they'd only play a few seconds of a few random, inconsequential videos that were low on the countdown or maybe had already been played a million times. Annoying, but reasonable I guess. Then it was like they'd skip most of 20 through 11, and only play the Top 10 (and even then they'd blow past a few), until finally they switched it to "Total Request Live", cut it to just 10 videos, put that nitwit Carson Daly in front of it and pretty much only played the Number 1 video in full and just clips from the rest, a lot of times. That was right around the time everyone up and decided they were done with MTV. Except people who were REALLY into Real World and Road Rules.

Alternative Nation, 120 Minutes, Liquid Television, Totally Julie, Headbanger's Ball... they used to have some incredible blocks of programming on there. I'd even put on Yo! MTV Raps sometimes if I was super bored or just trying to get the most out of staying up late on a weekend. Even the rap was good back then, mostly. We're talking the late-80s and early-90s stuff. And again, there was that wacky period of time when they'd play Speed Racer reruns at like 1 in the morning, that sh*t was dope. I was too young to partake yet, but I can only imagine people my older sister's age smoking weed and watching sh*t like Speed Racer, Liquid TV or The Maxx at 1 or 2 in the morning, back then. Must've been a blast. As it is I watched the stuff but I wasn't getting "the fully intended effect" so to speak.

Yeah, sh*t was good until about 1996. After that, newp.

Aw no dude, I loved MTV back then but my bro was SUPER into MTV back then.

I remember Yo MTV Raps played like 2 in the morning back when I still had school. Had to program the VCR to catch some of that.

VH1 was good in the 80s and some of the 90s too, but like MTV, that went downhill. I used to watch both stations a lot. BET was better when that first started, too. Video Soul was one show I used to watch on that station hosted by Donny Simpson. I have an idea why BET went downhill, though, but I don't really want to get into that...:oops: