Liquid Television

A regular show on MTv, when it was still on the cutting edge of creativity and non-conformism, Liquid Television featured a series of funny/disgusting/dumb/ingenious/disturbing shorts, mostly animated cartoons, but quite a bit of CGI, simple drawings, etc.

When I first went to college in 1994, this was on of the shows my friends and I would stay up to watch. It's bound to be remembered as an essential part of the Gen-X subculture (if you want to call it that).

Liquid Television is best known as where Mike Judge got his big break, with a demented little cartoon about two stupid losers named Beavis and Butthead, which everyone knows went on to have their own show (and equally important part of Gen-X) and eventually a feature length film. Judge, of course, went on to make "King of The Hill", one of the most popular shows on TV today.

During a time of great originality and artistic expression, Liquid Television was a testament to the fact that people can and do understand new ideas and appreciate them. Unfortunately, it is long gone and probably would not be appreciated in today's mass-produced, assembly line, politically correct media.

Liquid Television was a series shown on MTV in which animators, directors and producers could feature their own creations and characters in wildly different forms and genres. Some could be live-action, some were computer CGI (a pioneering technique at the time) or hand-drawn, some were done with puppets and some were stop-motion. Pretty much, this was a wonderful show for people who love all kinds of random, bizarre and crazy animated shorts.

If it were not for shows like Liquid Television there'd be no Aeon Flux, Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Daria or Office Space. But there were also many other lesser known characters and segments such as Dog Boy, The Art School Girls of Doom, Psycho Gram (which were brilliant!), Bobby and Billy (also brilliant), Winter Steele and Joe Normal. Basically all of the weirdest experimental stuff MTV could find.

I used to watch this on TV when I was 10 years old and I must say, for my fertile imagination at the time, this show was light-years ahead of the tame, PC crap that kids watch these days. I do wish a complete anthology of Liquid Television was put on DVD instead of this lame 'Best Of...' DVD that's OOP. Come on Paramount, why are we waiting?

There's no early Beavis and Butthead, no "The Maxx", no dogboy. It's missing some key elements! The stuff that got even bigger later. But even so, if you were a fan of the show, BUY IT! It's still got stuff I forgot about, Stick figure theatre and all. Worth the purchase on DVD for sure...

A brilliant and often demented collection of artists and the then experimental MTV gave us a new look at what animation could accomplish in the '90s. Combining animation, CGI, live-action and puppets, we got anything from 15-second bites to season-length serials exploring the adventures of such characters as bad-a** biker puppet "Winter Steele," pi**ed-off flower "Crazy Daisy Ed," the plastic-haired live action story of "Dog Boy," and those precocious youth "Bobby & Billy," and more than I can even remember. Don't forget this is the show that introduced us to "Aeon Flux," "The Head," and "Beavis and Butt-Head." This show changed my life. Well, sort of.

I was 20 when Liquid TV began to be aired in Spain (Tuesday nights 01:00 or 02:00 AM, prime time, eh?), and I remember only a few college freaks and me liked it, specially the variety of animations styles and contents. (I mean freaks because here this series was not broad-casted by MTV, but in TVE2 (like the BBC2), after a cultural program named Metropolis (that is still on air, by the way), so I doubt many Spaniards remember it).

I completely agree with Shawn Watson from Scotland: it was (still is) light years above the average animation series, so is a shame that now that we can buy almost every season of almost every famous TV series in shiny packages with full episodes and extras, this revolutionary show remains unavoidable.

At least most of you can buy the Wet Shorts DVD, unpublished in Spain.