Like many in my age bracket, my teenage to young adult years were spent watching MTV, back when the channel used play these things called music videos. (We’re going way back here.) However, while I enjoyed several of MTV’s musical outings, my favorite things to watch on MTV were episodes of BBC’s The Young Ones (we miss you, Rik Mayall!), The State, Liquid Television, Remote Control (the first game show for geeks, even before Comedy Central’s Beat the Geeks) and those weird little animated bumpers they used to show between videos and commercial breaks, several of which were done by some biggies in the industry like Fred Siebert and R. O. Blechman’s The Ink Tank. These would’ve gotten me into animation, if I hadn’t been a cartoon devotee already, that is.

I’ll be showcasing a crop o’ MTV bumpers (as well as Nick at Nite’s early bumpers) later on, but for now I’d like to spotlight one particular set of MTV bumps. Only Music Television would think to produce a series of bumps for a music video channel under the guise of cheesy kid-vid breakfast cereal ads.

There were 3 of these in all. First up, “Calamari Cereal”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-mLKlIBDi8

Next up, “Military Cereal”.

Finally, yes, they went here, “Death Cereal”. Even Susie was a bit taken back by this one.

Say, you noticed how the characters never actually said anything about MTV in these spots? You just noticed the channel’s logo printed in the cereal boxes. It was this sort of artistic weirdness that made spots like these fun and strangely intriguing. We’ll be taking a deeper look at spots like these later this month.

“Ha-haah! GOOD!”