Description

It's all here, the VJ's, the mistakes, the music videos, and even the commercials from the original broadcast back in August of 1981.

Music videos from the greats, Tom Petty, Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, and more as well as many one hit wonders from that time.

Commercials on the new break through items like stereo TV, the MTV Dial Sticker, Atari, and the new Dolby Sound system, as well as food, movies, and more.

A great item to own back when MTV played music and in the beginning was trying to find it's place with many on air mistakes as they ironed out the bugs.

On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time, MTV launched with the words "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll," spoken by John Lack, and played over footage of the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia, which took place earlier that year, and of the launch of Apollo 11. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching rock tune, playing over photos of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the flag featuring MTV's logo changing various colors, textures, and designs, used this public domain footage as a conceit with a beeping sound.

The first music video shown on MTV was The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". This was followed by the video for Pat Benatar's "You Better Run". Sporadically, the screen would go black when an employee at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR.^[ MTV's lower third graphics that appear near the beginning and end of music videos would eventually use the recognizable Kabel typeface for about 25 years, but these graphics differed on MTV's first day of broadcast; they were set in a different typeface and included record label information such as the year and label name.