MTV's moon landing ident aired 48 times a day until 1986
At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, MTV went on air with NASA's lunar landing photos, the flag on the Moon swapped for a flickering MTV logo. Then came the Buggles and Video Killed the Radio Star. That ident ran at the top and bottom of every hour for more than four years.
The channel started under Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, and its roots lay in Warner Cable's experimental QUBE system in Columbus, which also fed early Nickelodeon; a commissioned video show called PopClips was a forerunner. Video jockeys introduced the clips. In 1984 Warner spun MTV and Nickelodeon off into MTV Networks, and between August 1985 and May 1986 it sold the business to Viacom in two stages. The channel became a major force behind the growth of cable television.
Its look was deliberately unstable. Manhattan Design, a collective of Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman and Patty Rogoff, drew the logo in 1981 under creative director Fred Seibert: Rogoff sketched the chunky M and Olinsky spray-painted the TV. Only the outline stayed fixed, while idents filled it with endless colours and images, including one in which the M became an apple and the TV a snake. The moon ident was retired in early 1986 after the Challenger disaster, but the astronaut survives as the Video Music Awards statuette.
Those awards began in 1984, when Madonna performed Like a Virgin, and by 2012 they were MTV's most watched yearly event. The channel also invented rituals of its own: Spring Break broadcasts from Daytona Beach beginning in 1986, live summers from beach houses, and New Year's Eve in Times Square with a band covering a song just after midnight. On July 13, 1985, it carried 16 hours of Live Aid while ABC showed prime-time highlights. Twenty years later its Live 8 coverage drew complaints for talking over acts, including the reunited Pink Floyd, and its president admitted it had chased too many acts at the expense of full sets.
Over roughly four decades the channel drifted from music towards reality shows for teenagers and young adults. In 2010 it dropped the words Music Television from its logo. Its reach has shrunk as well: about 67 million American pay-TV households in November 2023, against a peak of 99 million in 2011.
Source: MTV
