Click here for my posts about MTV and here for Fred/Alanās MTV work.
Buzzco, New York, produced easily MTVās 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 āfrom Perpetual Motion Pictures, New Yorkā in our āmaybeā 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 heād 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 āmaybeā turned into āsure!ā
Of course, first up was our now famous āTop of the Hourā and its successor, the VMA āMoonman.ā 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 Olinskyās original logo illustrations, added a few great ones of her own, and directed the f--- out of the constantly mutating āMā so that it was seared into our fansā brains.
I looked at my mission to be āmaking the M famous!ā so the Top of the Hour (originally titledĀ āOne Small Stepā 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 MTVās 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 āI Want My MTV!ā 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 werenāt 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.Ā
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.
Itās 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/Alanās MTV work.















