video #08: Mr. T Experience - And I Will Be With You

Growing up without cable television meant that I'd had to hunt high and low to find music on television when I was a kid. This meant "Saturday Morning Videos" on Saturday mornings, "In Concert" on Saturday nights, and... well, that was about it. At least until I discovered JBTV on channel 66. That's station WGBO-TV, to be exact. It was never the highest-rated station in Chicago, or even in the top 5... or top 10, really. Years of re-runs, old movies, and local programs eventually gave way to endless infomercials, and the eventual switch to all-Spanish language programming. JBTV, which began in the mid 80s, soon moved to channel 30, where it may or may not still be on the air. I want to say that the show is a Chicago institution, but its appeal seems to be lost on the Myspace generation, not quite as dependant as most of us used to be for amusement, or as patient to stay up late and wait for it.

I remember a few videos that seemed to get played more than others, at least during the year or two that I tuned in during Wednesday nights in high school: "Liberty Calls," "Lo Batt," "Pure Morning," and this. It's not exactly the world's greatest fusion of live footage and animation ever seen, probably not slick enough to get them any MTV play. Then again, it probably still set them back a bit to make, and probably could have been done in Flash today for practically nothing. Not that that would make the video any better, but given the current woes of Lookout Records, it's just easy to look back and play cut-the-corners. At least they were ahead of their time with the fursuits.

This video probably has less than a minute of animation in it, so I don't know why I'm writing about it here. There's twice as much animation in, say, "Opposites Attract," but I have even less to say about that video (which is probably nothing at all, unless I really want to write about the unique challenges of Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat's interspecies relationship) than "And I Will Be With You." Selective nostalgia can't always be explained, I guess.