Relive the memories of trippy animation of your teenage years, online and free.
In the early 1990s, SBS Television was the perfect viewing on Saturday nights for teens to young adults after Hey Hey It’s Saturday. That was due to the infamous “Sex Before Soccer” scheduling (where usually SBS would show a foreign skin flick before going into a soccer match). But on some Saturday nights around 8:30pm, you would catch 25 minutes of interesting animation from around the world.
Liquid Television was berthed from the studios of MTV and and BBC Two, showcasing a series of animated shorts. From 1991 to 1994, various animated styles from independent and small studios, with some shorts displaying story arcs or one-shots, ranging from comedy to drama, were shown. A handful of these cartoons later spawned into bigger budget shows, such as Beavis & Butt-head, Æon Flux and Office Space. Each episode would feature a commercial or music video that would usually be shown on MTV, only to ‘dissolve’ on screen and have the Liquid Television bottle logo appear.
Three seasons were broadcast, and the show eventually had a spin-off called Cartoon Sushi, but didn’t have much of the same effect. In 2011, Liquid Television was brought back to life online through LiquidTelevision.com with new episodes. But the site now diverts directly to MTV.com.
Over the years the series never had a full home media release, only The Best Of Liquid Television Vol 1 & 2 on VHS, which are now hard to come by.
But, some genius has managed to throw up the entire original series on Archive.org.
So go a relive Æon Flux being killed in every episode (though Æon did receive a full DVD collection release when the 2005 live-action film starring Charlize Theron was released), a dodgy looking Beavis & Butt-head smashing a frog in cruelly drawn animation, and never look at your notepad the same way again with Stick Figure Theatre.
