Liquid Television
MTV's late-night animation grab bag, where a music video would melt into a stick-figure film noir, a sketch about art-school girls, and a wordless spy named Æon Flux who died at the end of nearly every short. It ran three seasons from 1991 and hatched two of the channel's defining cartoons: Beavis and Butt-Head arrived as a Mike Judge short called Frog Baseball, and Æon Flux grew from a six-part serial into her own series.
Liquid Television premiered on MTV on June 2, 1991, produced by (Colossal) Pictures with Japhet Asher as creator and executive producer and Prudence Fenton as executive producer and story editor; Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh wrote the theme. The first season was a co-production with the BBC and also aired on BBC Two. Independent animators and artists made most of the material specifically for the show, with some pieces compiled from festivals such as Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation, and several segments were adapted from Art Spiegelman's comics anthology RAW, including Charles Burns's Dog-Boy. The recurring bits gave the show its rhythm: Stick Figure Theatre re-enacting old movies, Winter Steele, The Art School Girls of Doom, The Specialists and Brad Dharma: Psychedelic Detective.
Its real legacy is what it launched. Peter Chung's Æon Flux debuted in the first season as a six-part serial, returned in 1992 as five stand-alone shorts, and was almost entirely free of intelligible speech; Chung later explained that he killed his heroine off in every short because he never intended to make more episodes. In 1995 she got a season of ten half-hour episodes as her own series, and in 2005 a live-action film starring Charlize Theron. The second season also carried Mike Judge's Frog Baseball, the first appearance of Beavis and Butt-Head: MTV bought it and two other Judge films for the showcase, then commissioned the series that became the channel's most popular program. Judge's Milton shorts, one of which ran on the same show, eventually grew into Office Space.
Many episodes opened with a contemporary music video being "liquified," and that licensed music is why full episodes have never been rebroadcast since the original run. What survives officially is a pair of late-1990s Best of Liquid Television VHS tapes and the 1997 DVD Wet Shorts, which collected them. The third season ran from 1993 into early 1995, the last original airing coming on January 1, 1995, and MTV followed it with Cartoon Sushi. MTV announced a revival in October 2011 as an online network, with a handful of full-length episodes following, but the show people remember is the one that interrupted the videos.
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