I was blown away to see that MTV 80s icons Blondie, Joan Jett and Cyndi Lauper have all been turned into Barbie dolls! Of course back in the 80s the animated TV series Jem gave Barbie a run for her money — while Barbie struck back with Barbie and the Rockers it was never quite cool as Jem. Too bad the licensing folks Mattel didn’t approach these 80s rock legends a bit sooner! Here’s Debbie Harry as Blondie doll which comes out in December: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 30, 2009 in Television
You can tell that this 1988 promotional spot for Florida TV station WBFS was done on a low budget, but it’s impressive that it features the voice of Pee-wee Herman who had defiantly gone big time at that point. I also love the added touches of the MTV graphics and the matching Madonna soundtrack. It’s funny to think back to a previous era when you’d enter a contest by sending an old school analog letter instead of an email or tweet…
With the passing of Michael Jackson everyone is focused on title “the king of pop” but to me his contribution was much more important in another area: The fine art of making music videos. This is important to me as I came of age in the 80s and while my taste in music was more on the new wave side than pop or R&B I was (and still am) bery much a hardcore fan of music videos. Yet even if you weren’t a Michael Jackson fan during that era if you were into music videos you couldn’t avoid his domination of the medium. In fact I think it would be fair to say that Jackson was one of the artists that made a network like MTV possible. Read more…
“MTV Networks is expected to announce on Thursday a deal to use songs by The Beatles in its popular “Rock Band” video game series, marking the band’s first major plunge into the digital music world. The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd and Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks have been in talks for months. They issued media invitations to a teleconference on “a global music project” on Thursday, but did not give more details.”
