Channel Frederator Blog

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW

Since I haven’t been able to get it together to run my old school library of cable TV network IDs from my agency days on Channel Frederator, I’m using the blog and the beta period of our cartoon social network, Channel Frederator RAW to do it.

Colossal Pictures was a young animation production company in the Mission District of San Francisco when I got introduced to their work by my mentor Dale Pon and my MTV colleague Sue Steinberg. There was no MTV yet, I’m not even sure we had named the network beyond a generic ‘The Music Channel’, but my partner Alan Goodman and I were searching through hundreds of animators’ reels looking for someone, anyone, who had the pop culture sensibility we were looking for to define our channel. Everyone else had either a dull, common feel to their work, or were bogged down in what the grown up broadcast networks were demanding. Lots of flying metal logos.

Then we spotted the last spot on the Colossal reel, a very cool music video of Calling All Girls by a drummer called Hilly Michaels. We knew we had our guys. Colossal went on to define the ‘feel’ of MTV, even to the point of producing the groundbreaking Liquid Television, which begat Aeon Flux and Beavis & Butthead.

Here’s what I wrote about them on the Fred/Alan website:

Colossal Pictures, San Francisco, was started in 1976 by Gary Gutierrez and Drew Takahashi. By 1981 they had produced an exciting body of work unknown outside of a very small group of ad executives and obscure musicians.

When we realized animation would be a cornerstone of the MTV “look”, we were more than conscious of the fact that neither of us really knew any animators. After looking at thousands of spots made by established studios, a friend gave us Colossal’s reel. Nothing seemed all that different about these guys until their very last spot, an unbelievable music video by an obscure drummer. It was a visual and rhythmic burst of rock’n’roll engergy, rather than a commercial who’s last creative influence had been 30 years before. Finally, our first partners.

Despite a rocky start (all of us were inexperienced), we developed a creative and personal bond with the entire Colossal team, launching a series of network IDs that would define a generation, and lead Colossal to the top of the creative film and commercial world.

–Fred