#buzzco

“I Want My MTV!” 1984-1985, featuring Cindy Lauper, Billy Idol, David Bowie,  Boy George & Culture Club, Hall & Oates, Joe Elliot/Def Lepard, The Police,  Madonna, John Mellencamp, Ric Ocasek/The Cars.

I Want My MTV! 1984-1985

Interview with animation director Candy Kugel

Director/animator Candy Kugel played a critical role in the original look of MTV: Music Television. She illustrated and directed the animation for the “Top of the Hour” (colloquially known as the “MTV moonman” piece), and many others too.* Collaborating with producer Buzz Potamkin, Vincent Cafarelli and Marilyn Kraemer at Buzzco/New York, it was a special creative relationship. 

Alan Goodman and I had started Fred/Alan in April 1983, after we’d overseen the original “I Want My MTV!” campaign Dale Pon and George Lois (agency: LPG/Pon) the year before. Wouldn’t you know that after we left, MTV was doing so well that the next year, they could afford much nicer spots? 

Candy went on to supervise and direct the animation of the ‘84-’85 “I Want My MTV!” for Buzzco. The spots had a much higher production value –live action shots around the world, with hand painting and rotoscoped animation overlays– were beautiful. Because of MTV’s early successes, the company was able to fund a much larger media buy in many more markets across America.

In June 2020, I talked with Candy about the production of the campaign.

Candy Kugel: The concept of using animation over live-action developed from an earlier project we did for a radio station in San Francisco. We had experimented with a Xerox process that allowed us to print film frames onto paper, and then we manipulated them by hand. When it came time to figure out how to integrate rock stars into the MTV campaign, we thought this technique would allow us to work over the live-action footage in a way that made it unique and exciting.

Fred Seibert: How did you get involved in developing this animation style?

Candy Kugel: Kodak had just released a type of paper that made photo rotoscoping possible without needing negatives. It was a direct printing technique that seemed perfect for what we wanted to do. [MTV President]  Tom Freston, [account executive] Leslie Fenn, and I discussed what the final look would be. I didn't have a concrete vision at the time, but I confidently told them, "It’ll look like nothing you've ever seen before."

Fred Seibert: What was the process of shooting the footage and developing the animation?

Candy Kugel: We shot Hall & Oates first at Silvercup Studios in New York. Daryl Hall was standing with his legs apart, and John Oates was on an apple box to match his height. It was funny, but it worked. We chose a take, sent it to the lab for rotoscoping, and then it was entirely up to me to animate over it. I had free rein creatively, which was exciting.

Fred Seibert: How were some of the other artists handled?

Candy Kugel: Cindy Lauper was a standout. She was shot in New York and had this great energy. She asked me how her line looked in her costume, and I assured her I’d fix any issues in the drawings. The take where she was surprised by the last champagne bottle popping was genuine, so we used that. Def Leppard also filmed in New York, and Joe Elliott came up with the punching bag idea himself.

Fred Seibert: What about Billy Idol?

Candy Kugel: He was shot in New York as well. I didn’t know his music beforehand, but the moment he walked into the room, he took my breath away. He had incredible charisma—completely commanding the space. More than a musician, he had a presence like an actor.

Fred Seibert: And Culture Club?

Candy Kugel: That was shot in Europe. I didn’t know their music much beforehand either. I was given footage and had to create something from it. I had a lot to work with, so I just started experimenting.

Fred Seibert: The Police were part of this as well, right?

Candy Kugel: Yes, but that was a difficult shoot. Dale returned from filming them with really bad footage. Sting was reportedly difficult, and the material was nearly unusable. It was frustrating, but we worked with what we had.

Fred Seibert: How did the final edits come together?

Candy Kugel: The inserts and final compilation were done at PrinzCo Rack with editor Michael Biondi. Dale was always particular about what color should be behind people, even though everything started in black and white and we added color later.

Fred Seibert: Looking back, what stands out to you most about the project?

Candy Kugel: It was such a creative and experimental time. We were pushing boundaries with a style no one had seen before, blending live-action with bold, expressive animation. It gave MTV its iconic, rebellious visual identity. Dale, for all his quirks, had a vision and trusted us to execute it. The campaign became legendary because it captured the spirit of MTV’s early years—bold, unexpected, and unapologetically fresh.

Fred Seibert: Thank you for sharing these insights. It was an incredible project.

Candy Kugel: My pleasure. 

Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.

Buzzco, New York, produced easily MTV’s most famous ID film.

To find the first animation companies to make network identifications for our new music channel, MTV, Alan Goodman and I had looked at 100 commercial reels with only one –from Perpetual Motion Pictures, New York– in our ‘maybe’ pile. But at first we were distracted by the innovative and spot on work from Colossal Pictures and Broadcast Arts. But, one day my mentor Dale Pon had told be about a nice experience he’d had with producer Buzz Potamkin and he might be good to meet. Lo and behold, Buzz was the proprietor of Perpetual, soon to be renamed Buzzco. One conversation and ‘maybe’ turned into ‘sure!’

Of course, first up was our now famous “Top of the Hour” and its successor, the VMA “Moonman.” After all, it was the pivot piece of every MTV hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days every year. And the half hour too! 75,000 times a year.

Director/illustrator/animator Candy Kugel took some of Frank Olinsky’s original logo illustrations, added a few great ones of her own, and directed the f--- out of the constantly mutating ‘M’ so that it was seared into our fans’ brains.

I looked at my mission to be “making the M famous!” so the Top of the Hour (originally titled “One Small Step” for very good reasons) was probably one of the first ways we could accomplish it.

But that was only the beginning. Like us, Buzz had admired the Sesame Street short animations, so we had a good time doing a parody, given that MTV’s format was not dissimilar, and our target viewers had all grown up with the show. The studio also adapted illustration work from Manhattan Design and others. Then in 1983, Buzz produced the very first “I Want My MTV!” commercials that I oversaw, directed by Thomas Schlamme and executive produced by Alan. And soon after, the paint over style they used in subsequent MTV commercials was repurposed for a fresh take on Top of the Hour.

Like these accomplishments weren’t enough, Buzz was critically important in other ways for me. Instrumental in helping Alan and I start our new business, Fred/Alan, he became a partner in our first production, a series for the Playboy Channel, and a mentor. 

Buzz patiently answered hundreds of my questions about the cartoon part of the entertainment business with such excitement that when he left the studio to Candy, Vincent Caffarelli and Marilyn Kramer to go West to start his own cartoon studio, he left me juiced enough about cartoon production that I followed a few years later and became the last president of Hanna-Barbera. Buzz joined me immediately as head of production and was instrumental in my getting What A Cartoon!, the pioneering re-booting of cartoon shorts off the ground.

It’s safe to say that without Buzz and Buzzco, MTV could have been much different channel.

Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.

Lift off, Tuesday, July 16, 2019 8:32am 

12 years, 11 days, 1 hour, 4 minutes later...

50 years ago, I completely missed the Apollo 11 moon walk of Neil Armstong. Eventually, I was going to have to make up for it.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I completely avoided the first man on the moon. I was an arrogant (surprise!), above it all 17 year old on vacation with my family behind the Iron Curtain (my mom was a political refugee from Eastern Europe). The night of the moon walk, which thanks to video, everyone on Earth could participate in, all 20 of my relatives were rushing off to find a black & white TV (in those days Bulgaria had, I don’t know, maybe one set per 100 people, even in the country’s capital) to see the most remarkable achievement ever shown. I had something better to do, I carelessly spat out. I was the middle of The Catcher in the Rye, and besides, how important could anything be? (Jeez, what a teenage asshole!) 

12 years, 11 days, 1 hour, and 4 minutes later, my time finally came. I could belatedly join in a global celebration, maybe even help revive it, an achievement that no matter our great differences, we could all marvel at as world citizens.

The whole story is over here, but suffice it to say that more than a decade after the fact I had finally realized what a jerk I’d been. But! I had a plan. At my new job as the first creative director of yet-to-be-launched MTV we needed something significant at the top of each hour of music videos.

MTV was going to be, after all, “The World’s First Video Music Channel.”

I was convinced that the fastest way to getting attention would be to meld our innovative mutating logo with “the most famous television moment ever,” Earth’s first man on the moon. Yeah, that’s the ticket! (Let’s completely skip the irony of the Earth first being celebrated completely away from our Earth.)

The moon walk was it, history’s most legendary televised event, perfect for appropriation. My only worry? That we’d have a generation of young children who wondered why their history lessons included astronauts planting an American flag. “What happened to MTV?!” 

By the way, a little known fact. Up until July 27, 1981, the original “top of the hour” included Armstrong’s renowned “one small step...” audio (embedded here, below). If we were going to be so damned narcissistic, why not go all the way and take the claim that we were “one giant leap for mankind”? I mean, come on. Only, we hadn’t bother to show it to the MTV legal eagle, who schooled us on the laws of “name and likeness” and, after hours of arguments with us self importants, made sure we re-edited the piece in the next couple of days before the network was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public.

Photographs: NASA Images, USA Left: Apollo 11 & Apollo 16, April 4, 1968, July 20, 1969 & April 16, 1972 Right: MTV August 1, 1981; photos from Apollo 6,, 11, & 16, April 4, 1968, July 20, 1969 & April 16, 1972

Video: Title: MTV: Music Television: One Small Step Logo: Manhattan Design: Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky, Patti Rogoff Animation: Buzzco/Perpetual Motion Pictures Director: Candy Kugel Producer: David Sameth Executive Producer: Buzz Potamkin Music: Jonathan Elias & Jon Peterson, EP: Scott Elias, Elias/Peterson Associates, New York Creative Directors for MTV: Fred Seibert & Alan Goodman

Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.

Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alan’s MTV work.

“Anniversaries are for parents!”

It’s hard to say why we thought August 1, 1982, the first birthday of MTV: Music Television, was such a big deal. I was off-the-record in jokingly telling a senior executive that we were rock’n’roll so we probably would be lucky to last five years.

But, we were so excited at actually making the thing work, so exhilirated that we pulled it off, exuberant that the old men cable operators we wrong, we were stunningly popular across the United States (soon the world!).

One way or the other, we wanted to celebrate. Even though the company was still losing a lot of money, everyone was certain we were onto something and soon enough the Benjamins would be rolling in. Given our circumstances though, the company wasn’t going to let us spend just to make ourselves happy, so the solution was to make the birthday all about the cable companies, who we would need for the next 20 years to get big enough to generate all that cash.

MTV 1st Birthday ID from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Manhattan Design (MTV logo originators) came up with the cardboard cable box and t-shirt, and Frank Olinsky illustrated. We even found a few bucks to animate a 10-second cake for the birthday.

“Birthday.” That’s the ticket. As with everything in those early days, the entire MTV team spent a lot of time figuring out our appropriate vocabulary. For everything.

First anniversary? First birthday?

“Anniversaries are for parents. For old people. We’re for kids.”

It was our first birthday.

I’ll point out that last year MTV celebrated it’s 40th birthday! So much for being careful about the brand. Sigh.

.....

Creative directors: Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman Design: Manhattan Design Illustration: Frank Olinsky Animation: Buzzco Associates, New York Thanks to Nancy Kadner Feingold for the cable box and t-shirt

Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, MTV Network Identifications 1981-1983 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

MTV ID Collection 1 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

MTV ID Collection 2 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The first professional animations I was involved with were with my first job in TV, the very first of dozens of 10 second network identifications for MTV during the channel's launch years. (You can read the background on the MTV logo here, and about other work I did for the channel over the years here.)

In the year before we went on the air for the first time I asked my boss whether we were going to have jingles, like commercial radio.

“NO!” Well, what then? “How about we animate our logo?” Which, by the way we didn’t have yet. “Think about an animated cow. Then a giant axe chops it’s head off. The head falls to the ground with the veins and blood oozing out. The cow vomits. And in the vomit is our logo!”

Oh, you mean, we can do anything we want. It was a great way to start a television career.

PS: From 1981 until 1992, Alan Goodman, my creative partner, and I were responsible for almost 1000 10-second network “branding” animations for MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Nick-at-Nite, Lifetime, The Movie Channel, and Comedy Central, among others. Alan had gone to film school, but these pieces were the beginning of my understanding how to tell stories with moving pictures. Why 10-seconds? It’s true that traditional broadcasting identities were generally 2-5 seconds, and were more like the “motion graphics” that are used even today. But, there were technical limitations at MTV Networks’ network operations center that didn’t allow videos shorter than nine seconds to be played. A 10 second film was too long to make the logo wiggle in space, so we took to developing pieces that had beginnings, middles, and ends, a story “arc.” For an ID, the story was what our channel stood for, a visual representation of the “personality” we wanted to convey. Alan and I looked at them as if they were moving “album covers” (we were originally a music channel, after all) and vinyl Long Players were the graphic innovations of our times.

.....