I Want My MTV (Animation)

If there were an award given to the trippiest television network, MTV would take home the prize, bar none. Visual design collective panOptic recently posted an animated ID for MTV2 on its website, panoptic.org, which has been picked up by a few websites.

Called "Sloth", the two back-to-back spots are weird, funny, and even a little disturbing, involving a sloth caught in some uncompromising positions. They're also a welcome reminder that MTV still remains open to raw, innovative talents.

Begun in New York nine years ago, panOptic broke into the TV business creating "idents" – or station identifications -- for Japanese television. "MTV saw those and liked them, and then it was inertia," panOptic's Gary Breslin told RES Magazine in 2003. "Once people figured out we could do TV commercial tags, it became our bread and butter work." In addition to idents, panOptic has created commercials, music videos, and short films, an excerpt of a potentially brilliant animated work-in-progress called "Planet X" is currently available on their site's front page.

But, of course, MTV's penchant for surrealism predates the cool kids at panOptic. Their "Sloth" spot reminded me of other famous MTV idents of yore, from "The Hairy M," "Altered States" and "Service Station." God bless YouTube, hundreds more can be found on the upload site, along with other mindbending Liquid Television gems that messed with the heads of many a teenager in the 1990s, from the hallucinatory "Aeon Flux," the inimitable long-legged sci-fi superhero, to "The Head," a strange series about a young man with a gigantic several-foot high cranium. What must they be smoking over there?