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VHS, MTV OMG

by Robin Hilton

My head is sloshing with a thick glop of sentimentality.

This past weekend I was visiting my brother who still lives in the small town where we grew up. It's always a bit of a nostalgia trip going home again, but on this visit he produced an old VHS tape with a video we'd made when we were in high school in the early 1980s. It was just a bunch of dumb kids goofing off, but it made me a little dizzy seeing all the mullets and how young we were.

Then this morning I come in to work and Bob drops me a link for this remarkable and hilarious video of a 1983 MTV broadcast. It's three hours long, complete with commercials from the time. The news updates are particularly priceless, like "Loverboy tour dates announced."

I wonder if this resonates at all with anyone under the age of say, 25.

Tags: mtv | mullets | the '80s | vhs | vjs

3:48 PM ET | 01-28-2008 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

I always had the hots for martha quinn. and she's still damn cute!

but i forgot how quickly they had gone pop. i remember the early days when they played people like ultravox!

Sent by OlderMusicGeek | 8:00 PM ET | 01-28-2008

Interestingly, what is old is in again -so the 80's is oddly hip (for a good many "kids"). What needs to happen, for those of us over 25, is that those pop songs that are currently re-mixing 80's lyrics/beats and getting plenty of accollades for their creativity, is we need to let those folks who absolutely LOVE those songs/artists know that the are contain highly "borrowed" "remixed" "redone" lyrics from 80's songs -- just to set the proverbial record (not the cd) straight!

Sent by Elizabeth Hodge | 8:37 AM ET | 01-29-2008

Oh this is awesome...

Not only do I get a retrospective of what the 80's were like 25 years later, I also get a nice memory jog of where I was November 19th, 1983. As the video showed the concert dates for the Police, I remembered: I went to my first outdoor concert to see the Police at the Meadows in Austin.

What a great show. There was a full moon and the wind was blowing about 30 to 40 miles an hour and for most of the show we were in a sand storm. After the show, you couldn't run your fingers through your hair because the wind and dirt turned it into cement. Sting pointed at the moon and said. "There's your next song" and played, of course, "Walking on the Moon." I wondered how much damage to all of the electronics and instruments occurred from that sand storm.

I know I am going to watch the whole three hours of your video at some point, so thanks for posting it!

-- Thanks for the memory. I love it. - rh

Sent by Mark Cooley | 5:27 PM ET | 01-29-2008

Thank you. That was painful but good medicine.

Sent by Biggie J | 1:40 PM ET | 02-15-2008

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