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MTV stands for Music Television, and when the network launched in 1981, its almost entirely music video-based programming was true to its name. Within a decade, however, its mandate had widened to the point that it had beco*e the natural home for practically any exciting development in American youth culture. And for many MTV viewers in the early nineteen-nineties, youthful or otherwise, nothing was quite so exciting as Liquid Television, whose every broadcast constituted a veritable festival of animation that pushed the medium’s boundaries of possibility — as well, every so often, as its boundaries of taste.

Liquid Television’s original three-season run began in the summer of 1991 and ended in early 1995. All throughout, its format remained consistent, rounding up ten or so shorts, each created by different artists. Their themes could vary wildly, and so could their aesthetics: any given broadcast might contain more or less conventional-looking cartoons, but also stickmen, puppets, early co*puter graphics, subverted nineteen-fifties imagery (that mainstay of the Gen‑X sensibility), Japanese anime, and even live action, as in the recurring drag-show sitco* “Art School Girls of Doom” or the multi-part adaptation of Charles Burns’ Dogboy.

Burns’ is hardly the the only name associated with Liquid Television that co*ics and animation fans will recognize. Others who gained exposure through it include Bill Plympton, John R. Dilworth, Richard Sala, and Mike Judge, whose series Beavis and Butthead and feature film Office Space both began as shorts seen on Liquid Television.

But no discussion of the show can exclude Peter Chung’s futuristic, quasi-mystical, dialogue-free Æon Flux, whose eponymous acrobatic assassin became a cultural phenomenon unto herself. The Æon Flux episodes have been cut out of this 22-video Liquid Television playlist, but you can also find a collection of uncut broadcasts at the Internet Archive.

The Tongal video above credits the show’s influence to the insight of the show’s creator Japhet Asher, who saw that “the attention span of your average TV viewer, particularly young people, was getting shorter and shorter.” Hence Liquid Television’s model: “If you didn’t like the current short, another one, which would be totally different, would be along in a few minutes. Furthermore, if a segment was so inexplicably bizarre and brain-tickling, perhaps an even more co*pelling one would co*e next.” At the time, this would have been taken by some observers — much like MTV itself — as a disturbing reflection of an addled, over-stimulated younger generation. But with Youtube still about a decade and a half away, it’s fair to say they hadn’t seen anything yet.

Related content:

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Minutes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes: Discover the Postmodern MTV Variety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Television Age (1985–87)

When a Young Sofia Coppola & Zoe Cassavetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revisit Hi-Octane (1994)

The Beautiful Anarchy of the Earliest Animated Cartoons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Early Animations

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.