Liquid Television

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Liquid Television is an Emmy award-winning anthology animation program, produced by Colossal Pictures, that ran on MTV from 1991 to 1994, with the first season also running on BBC Two concurrently with MTV. It has served as the launching point for a number of original series that later became popular on their own, such as Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, and The Head. The bulk of Liquid Television's material was created by independent animators and artists specially for the show, and some previously produced segments were compiled from festivals such as Spike And Mikes Sick And Twisted Festival Of Animation. Mark Mothersbaugh composed the show's theme music. There were also a large number of animation pieces adapted from the work of Art Spiegelman's comic compilation, RAW. RAW featured underground cartoonists such as Mark Beyer, Richard Sala, and Peter Bagge. In particular, Dog-Boy by Charles Burns was based on the artist's series from RAW.

Selected segments from the series, including the first appearances of Aeon Flux, were released on two VHS tapes in the late 1990s as The Best of Liquid Television parts one and two. These tapes are long out-of-print . A collection volume, titled Wet Shorts (The Best of Liquid Television), comprising the two VHS tapes, was available on DVD but this too is out-of-print.

Shorts from the series are now being officially uploaded onto http://liquidtelevision.com

Recurring Series

• The Adventures of Thomas and Nardo
• Aeon Flux
• The Art School Girls Of Doom
• Buzz Box
• Crazy Daisy Ed
• Cut-Up Camera
• Dangerous Puppets
• Dog-Boy
• Footworks
• Invisible Hands
• Joe's Apartment
• Miss Lidia's Makeover To The Stars
• Psycho-Gram
• Soap Opera
• The Specialists
• Speedbump the Roadkill Possum
• Stick-Figure Theatre
• Winter Steele

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Tropes used in Liquid Television include:

• Antimatter: In one series, The Specialists, the heroes meet up with their antimatter counterparts, who were chromatically opposite but otherwise identical.
• Butt Monkey / They Killed Kenny: Speedbump the Roadkill Possum.
• Deranged Animation: Frequently.
• Fake-Out Opening: Most of the first season episodes started with a music video playing, only for it to gradually morph into the Liquid Television
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Less so now that the website's up.
  • Stuff like Stick Figure Theatre, Miss Lidia's Makeover To The Stars, and the Fake Out Openings are still not available, possibly due to copyright issues.
• Negative Continuity: Aeon Flux died at the end of every short.
  • The same thing goes to Speedbump the Roadkill Possum.
• Nipple-and-Dimed: The Aeon Flux shorts.
• Spiritual Successor: Stickin' Around, at least for Stick Figure Theatre.