MTV Europe was launched in 1987 on August 1st. Over the years in most European countries MTV Europe was replaced with their own various local versions of Music Television, but MTV Europe is still going strong serving Iceland, Israel, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Malta.
Publicity materials from around the launch....
MTV Europe Idents
MTV has had an enormous effect on popular culture, influencing music, movies, fashion, graphic design and more.
The world famous MTV logo is amongst a class of instantly recognisable worldwide symbols such as CocaCola and Disney. A basically blocky M (Gill Sans Extra Bold) and a spray painted 'TV' has remained the same. Reminiscent of the 20th Century Fox logo, it's more than a 2-D image, as the shadow implies dimension, whist the spray painted TV implying action.
MTV has always has a strong commitment to innovative graphic design, and for it's US launch the network decided animation would be their main medium for station idents. For a practical reason as virtually all music videos at the time were live-action. They reasearched hard for animators, instead of large established ones, they chose people who specialised in alternative frame by frame designs, eg using crayon, cut-outs, metal etc.. "We wanted to do something everybody else was absolutely ignoring."
Below are just some of the results of the 10 second station idents used by MTV Europe in it's early years onair. The channel easily had the most visually exciting television graphics of the time.
MTV Europe Promos
A few promotional trailers used here by MTV Europe...
MTV Europe Programmes
MTV Europe Presenters
examples of track listing astons...
