Steve Oakes & Peter Rosenthal: MTV Channel IDs
Peter Rosenthal sat outside my office door at without an appointment for months in 1981, hoping to show me the work of the studio he owned with Steve Oakes, Broadcast Arts from Washington DC. By late May I realized we were months behind getting our network on the air and asked my assistant, Nina Silvesteri, “Is that guy still out on the couch?” He showed me their exclusively stop-action work, I asked him how many 10-second spots they could have ready in six weeks (at $5000 per) and sent them off to work with a sheet of illustrated logos by Manhattan Design and music tracks by EliasArts.
Broadcast Arts and MTV revived the almost-dead art of stop motion animation over the course of the year (my boss thought the “MTV look” should be computer motion star fields, popular in those years after Star Wars) and we thought it should be more like Gumby (contrarians that we were/are). They went on to win us our first network creative award for Sandwich. Broadcast Arts went on to be the original animation studio for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse; Steve Oakes went on to a distinguished career as a founder of Curious Pictures.
–Fred
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On October 5th, 2006 at 12:00 am
These were really great. Cool stuff.
Thanks for sharing!
-JX!
On October 27th, 2006 at 12:00 am
It was great seeing some of these again. I recently found someone who worked at Broadcast Arts that shared me a sample of the work they did back then for MTV and other clients, it just impressed the hell out of me to see some of what I remember seeing or haven’t seen before.
Several I enjoyed were the one with the Sandiwich and the meteorite thingy crashing into an unsuspecting home. Those were pretty impressive for what attention had been given to them.
Incidentally some of the separate MTV ID’s that are getting stuck on GoogleVideo and YouTube originated from the efforts of a few out there had in collecting every single ID from old recordings made during those glory years.
I only wish MTV nowadays was like this again. They’ll never go back to those days. I remember being glued to the boob toob constantly as a 5 year old just to see those things show up when the channel was added to my service around ‘83 or so.