I Want My MTV – The Rob Reviews MTV Classic

I think by now people know I am a lifelong die-hard MTV fan.  As a lover a both music AND television, MTV has always been a channel tailor-made for me even when their programming has NOTHING at all to do with music.  So I was VERY excited to hear that on August 1st of this year that VH1 Classic was turning into MTV Classic.  (I actually consider it more of a Pokemon Go-style evolution as opposed to transition, but hey.)  Promising shows from the first half of MTV's first 30 years in broadcasting, like Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV Unplugged, Daria, The Real World, and of course, the MUSIC VIDEOS, MTV Classic immediately became a channel I could not wait to see.

For my household, adding MTV Classic (along with about 130 additional channels of varying levels of interest) costs $9.99/month.  That's not too bad, all things considered.  Is the channel living up to the hype?  I'll address that below!

I'll cut to the chase and give MTV Classic a letter grade...  And that will be a B-.  Everything that I was promised I feel is present.  However, there IS room for improvement.

I know 24 hours/day means a lot of airtime to fill with a channel that already has the main MTV, MTV 2, MTV Tres, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, MTV Live, and others (that's not a joke), so you will obviously encounter a large amount of reruns.  That's fine and to be expected.  At least the stuff they're rotating is solid.  When you tune over to MTV Classic you will likely be inside something music-related.  Maybe it's an episode of MTV Unplugged from bands like Nirvana, Aerosmith, R.E.M., Oasis, Alice in Chains or Bob Dylan...  That's great!  You may also encounter episodes of 120 Minutes, Pop Up Video, Behind the Music, or one of several "rockumentary" films.

There are also blocks of videos, which is cool too.  They separate their videos by genre/era per hour.  So if the whole hour will be, for example, rock videos.  They have blocks for 80s, 90s, rock, pop, hip hop, and more.  These will hit all the right nostalgia chords for you thirty-somethings like me, although I do with they wouldn't block their videos together so much.  While they do a good job of playing the HITS that I remember, they way they segment their videos wouldn't allow something like Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" to play anywhere NEAR Salt n Pepa's "Shoop."

The cartoons are a great asset, too.  However, they can become a bit shallow too.  Sure there's Daria, which is just "whatever" to me.  The cartoon of most interests to most people is likely Beavis and Butt-Head.  Well, they're here.  However, the only ones that MTV Classic has aired have been from the 2010-2011 reboot.  That being said, in all honesty, those few episodes are actually the best of them all, but I'm hoping that eventually they will start diving deeper back into the 1990s episodes, which I do expect them to because I'm almost certain they have the rights to them.