#network ids

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.

The Movie Channel, network identifications 1988 & 1981

Not all of the branding work Fred/Alan did was visible or famous, but we weren’t any less proud of it. The 1988 assignment to redesign The Movie Channel was one of those.

Fred started his career in May 1980 at The Movie Channel, then owned by Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (aka WASEC, the precursor to MTV Networks and Viacom), more on that below. We both left in April 1983 to start Fred/Alan, and later that year Showtime acquired The Movie Channel (whew!). A few years later, new management imported from HBO decided to put muscle behind The Movie Channel. In the meantime, Showtime had become a major Fred/Alan client and our reputation in developing brands and trademarks got us the assignment.

The Eyes Have It As he would a couple years later with HA!, Noel Frankel, our creative director, would adapt his prodigious design skills to our “changing logo” perspective and created a logo that would zero in on the soul of all people, their eyes. It was a hard sell at first –what? no cool, zapping colors like you did at MTV?– but eventually the team came aboard. Noel had succeeded in creating one of our most compelling –if not most popular– logos.

Our friends at Charlex had by then done several years of great productions for us at Nickelodeon, Myers’s Rum, and HA!, and we worked well with their emotional approach to video. Almost unique among “motion graphics” and visual effects companies, co-founder Alex Weil understood it wasn’t all about floating type. He instantly groked the eyes and worked creative magic with our team.

The Movie Channel 1981

The 1988 TMC project contrasted mightily with the first one we did for the channel back in the day. While we had already had a instinctual “yes!” about how to brand MTV, for a variety of reasons The Movie Channel initially escaped us. Though this project was started long before our MTV work, it wasn’t finished until the very last day of the year. And we didn’t know if we wanted them to be promos (with voiceover, like a short commercial) or just a tasty, fresh, appropriate visual. They turned out to be camels where they felt like “a horse created by committee.” But we were our own committee. 

We came up with “marketing propositions” (aka promises) the same as we did for MTV and eventually Nickelodeon, but the essence of the first all-movie cable channel just escaped us. We worked with one of our favorite producers, Jerry Lieberman in New York, for a friendly, fun hand drawn animation style, and great illustrators like Frank Olinsky and Susan Rivor, but... well, you can’t hit it out of the park every time.

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The Movie Channel 1988 Agency: Fred/Alan, Inc. New York  Executive creative directors: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert  Logo design & creative director: Noel Frankel  Producer & sound design: Tom Pomposello  Production company: Charlex, New York

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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.

See more of our Nick-at-Nite posts here.  

Nick-at-Nite network identifications 1987-1989 

(The Nick-at-Nite video posted here is really long. But, if you just watch the first 90 seconds you’ll get the gist.)

The assignment to create network IDs for Nick-at-Nite arose from two different circumstances. The first and best is that the channel that we had created was a roaring success (thank goodness, we’d expended a lot of our reputation on this nutty idea) and they deserved a chance to strut their stuff. But, the second was fostered by their confusion.

Two years in, by 1987 Nick-at-Nite had been a tough sell for the advertising sales department. After 35 years of traditional broadcast networks, a certain conventional wisdom had set in with media buyers. And Nick-at-Nite exploded all of them.

Color good, black & white bad. Logical on the surface. New good, reruns bad. Got it. Network television (CBS, NBC, ABC) good, cable not so much.

Well, our channel was all B&W, all reruns, all cable. Never mind that in six months we’d become the #2 primetime cable channel (after USA), branded ourselves as “good TV” and the greatest hits of the TV generation, and brought in an audience that loyally followed our unstated premise to reject the idea of “Ugh, reruns” and shouted “Oh boy! Reruns!”

Nonetheless, the media buyers at the ad agencies, while on the surface adhered to the manta of “just show me the numbers!” turned their back on us.

Our sales team was hurting.They made their case to the programming and marketing folks at NAN and suggested that we position the channel as “all comedy.” Not a bad thought (HA! and Comedy Central would be around the corner) but it didn’t really work for Nick-at-Nite.

Nonetheless, they persisted. So, the brain trust at Fred/Alan put our heads together. Led by Alan, we had often referenced bits from the Rocky & Bullwinkle show, particularly our favorite.

Bullwinkle: “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

Rocky: “That trick never works.”

Alan: “In my view the most brilliant bumpers ever because as a kid you knew there were three endings. You'd wait through the commercials to see which of the three it was this time.

“Of course Jay Ward probably did it because he got five for the same money. The man was even more brilliant than he knew.“ 

Basically, what Ward had done was take about 10 seconds of animation, and make five one second pieces, and Bullwinkle says, “Presto!” he had five surprise endings for about the money of 1.25 films. A great method for us to use a budget more efficiently and still get dozen of films that could be reused for years without wearing out the viewers. These IDs were stop motion live action, in color, to contrast with the programming.

We quickly huddled with two of our long term creative companions, Eli Noyes and Kit Laybourne who jammed ideas with Fred/Alan producer Tom Pomposello, put together a production and we were off to the races.

Live action filming in stop motion (a neat trick) with a six second opening that would be repeated in all 45 spots and 45 different, silly, hopefully surprising and funny 4-second back ends. That meant, for the first set alone, we shot three minutes of footage, but got seven and a half minutes of final film. Not bad.

Over the next couple of years we did three sets, the first in April starring a man, the second –eight months later– with a woman, and the last in 1989 with both actors as a couple. About 20 minutes of 10-second pieces. Whew! Top it off with Pomposello’s take on the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” and there was the making of a pretty unique branding stab.

Of course, Nick-at-Nite as a comedy channel never took off. A new ad sales chief came in from Turner Broadcasting and declared Nick-at-Nite to be “marketing machine!” and we were at last profitable, not just successful.

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K-Girl Squad: giffer

Dr. John, the undoubtable Mac Rebennack, is releasing a fantastic new album today, a stellar addition to his discography, produced with great care and talent by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Here's a free version of the first single, "Revolution":

The release gives me a great excuse to highlight a couple of projects I worked on with the good Doctor involved with in the late 1980s. The chance to work with one of the rhythm & blues greats was really a career highlight. In both cases Mac's participation because one of his record producers was Ed Levine, a colleague at my ad agency Fred/Alan in New York.

Fred/Alan IDs 1988 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

My favorite was probably the set of animated IDs we did for an obscure television station in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1988. TV Heaven was a local version of what Fred/Alan had done with Nick-at-Nite on a national basis, where we made an overnight hit station from an obscure UHF transmitter in the sticks. Mac came into the recording studio planning on recording one track for us, and ended up improvising six melodies on the spot during our scheduled time. I don't remember the writer for this one, but I think I like it the most:

"Some people go from dollars to donuts, but I'll take pennies from heaven. TV Heaven 41." 

The animations you see here were done after the style of the legendary Fred Mogubgub, and directed by Fred in New York, Marv Newland and International Rocketship in Vancouver, and Marc Karzen in New York. 

You can get the entire TV Heaven story here at Fred/Alan's archive.

13 second video jingle VH-1 from fredseibert on Vimeo. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was the network that had my clearest fingerprints all over it, and ultimately became one of the list of reasons I had for leaving the business. In any event, the era of the early 90s remains a personal favorite of mine. But, of course, I’m biased (or maybe it’s just my age). No one knew what to do with VH-1. “Video Hits One” didn’t work. “The Other Music Television” didn’t work. And “Baby Boomers Deserve Their Own Channel” didn’t work. Time for some Fred/Alan rebranding. Tom Freston and I were having a rare sit down outside the office one day in late 1990 lamenting what had crashed and burned at VH-1. Launched as a “fighting brand” to Ted Turner in 1985, the channel had limped along never quite finding it’s way. Don’t know what came over me --maybe it was the continuing strength of our hit invention at Nick-at-Nite-- but I blurted out that the “solution” to VH-1 was oldies. “Music video is just about 10 years old, so the oldest generation of video fans is already between 35 and 45 years old, VH-1’s target. These people have no interest in the newest hair bands, they want to hear the music they already liked and fit it into a soundtrack of their lives. And this generation were teenagers smack dab towards the end of fast talking DJs and zippity jingles. Let’s remix the golden age of Top 40 radio and MTV and turn the channel into ‘VH-1! The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!'” I'm not sure what came over Tom either, because he enthusiastically agreed and immediately cleared the way with management. We brought in a leading programming consultant, Fred Jacobs, who enthusiastically took to the idea and brought a lot of great ideas. We walked the entire staff through our point of view, and the reasoning behind it. As usual with a big organization, some people embraced the idea fully, and others were left grumbling (it wasn't exactly the hippest solution, and MTV Networks was screaming with hipsters). Creatively we went right to work, because there was a lot to do, and not much of a budget to do it with (remember, it's not like the channel was in the greatest shape). The format was going to be like "hit radio", with lots of announcer breaks (voice over only, no more VJs that no one liked), a half dozen "promise" tags (the station slogans), and, for me at least, the most fun was going to be using authentic Top 40 style radio jingles (more later). I enlisted Rowe Jones (we'd worked together on TV Heaven) to do an ungodly amount of daily work for us from his Florida studio; he would write, announce, and produce all the daily copy, and he became the voice of the network. The jingles were going to be an interesting puzzle. No one on television had taken the 30 year, iconic sounds of hit radio and translated them, and while I thought the sound would be a slam dunk, the visuals were another matter entirely. At Fred/Alan we always thought the most provocative "look" of a network was actually driven through the aural passages, that television was, in fact, as much as an audio medium as visual. I went right the best source in the world, Jonathan and Mary Wolfert's JAM Creative Productions in Dallas, Texas. Jon was crazy for the idea, and once we settled a few union singer residual issues, he dove right in, taking our dozen tags (from "the greatest hits!! of music video!!!" to "a-nother ow-er! of video pow-er!!!") and constructing a classic sound with a totally 90s feel. The video was trickier because what was a "video jingle" anyway? No one had done it before. Perceptual distinction was called for, certainly, but what did that mean? We went to two innovators for the answers. VMA winner Alex Weil at Charlex and Academy Award winner Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision. And over the Christmas/New Year's holiday of 1990/91 they bum rushed the execution of flawless packaging for this sort of new channel. Basically, the gig was like this: we had a number of different jingles, from three second "stingers" to 10+ second full chorus pieces. Both directors would use the exact same tracks, but lay over hundreds of video variations. There wasn't exactly a budget for all that, but Alex and Zbig would develop a certain number foreground action with singers, dancers, and actors, and green screen as many backgrounds as could be afforded.

Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Charlex from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Charlex founders Charlie Levi and Alex Weil burst onto the scene with their 1984 sweep of the first VMAs (with Jeff Stein and my wife-to-be-10-years-later) for The Cars' "You Might Think." High profile assignments for SNL and Fred/Alan soon followed. We were all about the same age with parallel backgrounds and cultural influences (I knew we were in exactly the right place at our first meeting when Charlie made a crack about Fred Flintstone; very rare in the advertising world that someone would go so lowbrow). Fred/Alan actually became the Charlex ad agency in the late 80s. Nickelodeon, Myers's Rum, and HA! saw some pretty good Fred/Alan-Charlex collabs, and we all had a great time doing it. Alex Weil was the consummate confederate for VH-1. He had an awesome pop sensibility, but sometimes he wanted to think he was more sophisticated than that. A perfect conflict. And the clash was superbly matched to these jingles. Alex took to them in a heartbeat, reveling in the casting process and the dozens of different mix & match backgrounds he was going to put together with the logos. My favorite accidental casting came about when Alan saw 1990s Miss Soviet Union and her runner up, beautiful blondes both, on David Letterman's Late Night and got them over to Charlex the next day (the spot are in the package above). I'm sure they (or their handlers) had absolutely no idea what was going on or what they were lip syncing, but they were VH-1 stars for the next three years.

Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Zbigvision from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski was a surprise 1983 Oscar winner for his animated short "Tango and immediately picked shorts assignments for Lorne Michaels' "The New Show" (where we were introduced by Colossal Pictures' Lidia Przyluska) and then a whole passel of innovative conceptual music videos and films. Always pushing envelopes with technical R&D, by 1990 Zbig was one of the first directors dedicated to video composing using (then) rare HD video cameras from Sony. Watching Zbig plan a shoot was a fascinating and often confusing experience. He didn't make conventional storyboards, preferring to map out the mathematical components of his vision on graph paper. The VH-1 one project was no different. Polish born, he didn't have any of the nostalgic feelings for the Top 40 style radio jingles that Alex, Alan, or I had; I've no idea if he even knew what they were. So, his vision was starker and weirder, not one bit pop (at least not what I was familiar with; people in potato sacks or pajama onsies?). But, the way we figured it, we had plenty of pop with Charlex, and the pieces were just a few seconds each. No one could really have enough time to hate them. By the time he was done, I found Zbig's pieces mesmerizing. …… Alas, "The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!" was destined to be another in the long line of losing formats for VH-1. Our ratings improved dramatically for a little while (as all new VH-1 formats seemed to do) but really just sputtered along for most of it's time on the air. I'm not exactly sure why it didn't work, except that maybe our timing was off by maybe 15 years or so (music videos are the most popular film form on YouTube, the world most popular video player by a factor of 10), and it didn't help that management was only going along because they'd been order to do so. Within a year they were continually undermining it, putting in their hipster touches all over the place. So, ultimately, it was, at best, an idea out of time, and at worst, just plain wrong. John Sykes came into the channel in 1994, hated (hated) the Greatest Hits, and instituted his "Music First" format. It crapped out too.

-Fred ….. December 26, 1990 & January 4, 1991 Jingles produced by JAM Creative Productions, Dallas, Texas Videos produced & directed by Alex Weil @ Charlex, NYC, and Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision, Hoboken, NJ VH-1 logo: Scott Miller & Myles Tanaka Executive Producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, Fred/Alan, Inc., New York

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