Don't Stop Her Now

The archive for MTV's 120 Minutes! From 1986 through 1995! Not every episode, obviously. But wow... I wish they would have had that one episode I had on tape during the summer of 1987 when they showed the Waxing Poetics video to "If You Knew Sushi", which was such a crazy big deal at the time, seeing a local band on MTV in any aspect, Even if it was around one in the morning.

But anyone who remembers 120 Minutes remembers distinctly how it was those two hours on Sunday nights when MTV used to show the videos that it would never get away with during primetime. Because, well, in the late 80's and early 90's bands like The Go-Betweens, Bad Religion, and The Wolfgang Press wouldn't be able to compete alongside Paula Abdul. Not to mention MTV was already in the process of weeding out their daily music rotation in favor of more traditional TV programming (let's not forget they practically ushered in the reality show craze with their Real World zeitgeist in 1992). Although we all joked on host Dave Kendall at the time with his hipster clothing and pompous demeanor (hey, we were pompous, hipster kids too) we still couldn't deny the fact that Sunday nights from midnight to 2 a.m. were the only reason to stay home from the punk shows and underground clubs one night a week. At least before the program ran stale in the mid 90's, running the same major label "alternative" bands that MTV was now showing in the afternoons as well, once the whole genre went mainstream.

Still, in an era when MTV was strip-running videos by the likes of Poison and Gloria Estefan, when would we have ever gotten a change to see a music video like this on the same channel? (BTW, the night this video aired Dave Kendall said that he HATED this video more than anything in the world and he was only going to show it ONCE and never again. Yutz. See why we hated him? ;) )



While I'm on a roll about the early 90's, it seems my palie Greg was on a similar wavelength last night when he posted the "Zoo Animals On Wheels" segment from the short-lived Get A Life, starring Chris Elliott, son of famed comedian Bob Elliott from "Bob & Ray", who also played Chris' long-suffering father on the series, along with Elinor Donahue (Betty Anderson from Father Knows Best) as his mother. Chris, a dimwitted 30-year-old paperboy still living at home, was also known for his own skits performed regularly on David Letterman back in the 80's, which is where I became a fan of his. But Get A Life was something extraordinarily special for its time: Something so completely off the wall, so unexplainable it often bordered on Dada. And so did this clip, which embodies Chris' kind of simple child-like spirit that often made you want to punch him hard in the face for it. The series came out on DVD briefly but went out of print just as quickly, and I never got a chance to get any of them in its time -- although I hear they are still struggling with musical rights, since each episode often had a montage featuring some popular song. I hear by the second season they stopped using R.E.M.'s "Stand" as the theme song and went with something more public domain. WKRP In Cincinnati is currently suffering the same issue on DVD.



Anyway, enjoy "Zoo Animals On Wheels" (the laugh track has been removed on the clip). And thank you again, Greg, for reminding me of the night this first aired. Holy smokes, that was probably the last time I laughed that hard.