Revisit Episodes of Liquid Tv, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Humorous, Irreverent & Weird Animation

MTV stands for Music Tele­vi­sion, and when the web­work launched in 1981, its virtually complete­ly music video-based professional­gram­ming was true to its identify. With­in a decade, how­ev­er, its man­date had widened to the purpose that it had turn out to be the nat­ur­al dwelling for prac­ti­cal­ly any excit­ing devel­op­ment in Amer­i­can youth cul­ture. And for a lot of MTV view­ers within the ear­ly 9­teen-nineties, youth­ful or oth­er­sensible, noth­ing was fairly so excit­ing as Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, whose each broad­forged con­sti­tut­ed a ver­i­ta­ble fes­ti­val of ani­ma­tion that pushed the medi­um’s certain­aries of pos­si­bil­i­ty — as properly, sometimes, as its certain­aries of style.

Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s orig­i­nal three-sea­son run started within the sum­mer of 1991 and finish­ed in ear­ly 1995. All via­out, its for­mat remained con­sis­tent, spherical­ing up ten or so shorts, every cre­at­ed by dif­fer­ent artists. Their themes may range wild­ly, and so may their aes­thet­ics: any giv­en broad­forged would possibly con­tain roughly con­ven­tion­al-look­ing automotive­toons, but additionally stick­males, pup­pets, ear­ly com­put­er graph­ics, sub­vert­ed 9­teen-fifties imagery (that essential­keep of the Gen‑X sen­si­bil­i­ty), Japan­ese ani­me, and even dwell motion, as within the recur­ring drag-show sit­com “Artwork College Women of Doom” or the mul­ti-part adap­ta­tion of Charles Burns’ Canine­boy.

Burns’ is difficult­ly the the one identify asso­ci­at­ed with Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion that comics and ani­ma­tion followers will rec­og­nize. Oth­ers who gained expo­certain via it embrace Invoice Plymp­ton, John R. Dil­value, Richard Sala, and Mike Choose, whose sequence Beav­is and Butthead and fea­ture movie Workplace House each started as shorts seen on Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion.

However no dis­cus­sion of the present can exclude Peter Chung’s futur­is­tic, qua­si-mys­ti­cal, dia­logue-free Æon Flux, whose epony­mous acro­bat­ic assas­sin grew to become a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto her­self. The Æon Flux episodes have been minimize out of this 22-video Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion playlist, however you too can discover a col­lec­tion of uncut broad­casts on the Inter­internet Archive.

The Ton­gal video above cred­its the present’s influ­ence to the perception of the present’s cre­ator Japhet Ash­er, who noticed that “the atten­tion span of your aver­age TV view­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly younger peo­ple, was get­ting quick­er and quick­er.” Therefore Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s mod­el: “When you did­n’t just like the cur­lease quick, anoth­er one, which might be whole­ly dif­fer­ent, can be alongside in a number of min­utes. Fur­ther­extra, if a seg­ment was so inex­plic­a­bly weird and brain-tick­ling, per­haps an much more com­pelling one would come subsequent.” On the time, this is able to have been tak­en by some observers — very like MTV itself — as a dis­turb­ing reflec­tion of an addled, over-stim­u­lat­ed youthful gen­er­a­tion. However with Youtube nonetheless a few decade and a half away, it’s honest to say they’d­n’t seen any­factor but.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­forged (August 1, 1981)

All of the Music Performed on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Submit­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Present That Made Warhol a Star within the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

When a Younger Sofia Cop­po­la & Zoe Cas­savetes Made Their Personal TV Present: Revis­it Hello-Octane (1994)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Automobile­toons: Discover an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e-book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e-book.