Return to 1981 and Watch the First Four Hours of MTV's Launch

Do you remember what you were doing on Saturday, August 1, 1981, at the stroke of midnight? I guess that's more of a rhetorical question - I really don't expect you to remember such a specific date and time. Instead of trying to figure out what you WERE doing, I bet I can tell you what you WEREN'T doing. If you were like me, and I imagine a lot of other folks, you were NOT watching the launch of a new cable network that would eventually become a worldwide pop-culture juggernaut. It was on that day, at that time, that the world was introduced to Music Television, or as we would all come to know it as just MTV.

I didn't witness the launch because I was 5 years old at the time, and I was probably asleep at midnight, also because I didn't live in New Jersey at the time. What does New Jersey have to do with anything? Well, according to History.com, MTV "initially was available only to households in parts of New Jersey." Did you know that? I sure didn't.

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Do you ever wish that you could go back in time and relive the early days of MTV...like the really, really early days...like THE very first day? I mean, I know that the first video they played was "Video Killed the Radio Star" from the Buggles - I only know that because it's been a trivia question for nearly 40 years. Other than that, I really don't know much about that first day of programming. Well, you actually can go back to those first few hours of MTV, and you don't need a Delorean or a flux capacitor - all you need to do is scroll down just a wee bit further.

I found the video below - footage of the first four hours of MTV - on a pretty cool website called Archive.org, which is "a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." Seems like a great way to wrap up another Throwback Thursday and to get yourself ready to go for another Feel Good 80's Weekend, which starts every Friday at 5pm.