It is 5 October. There are 26 days until Halloween.

Those of us who happened to have grown up during the 1980s are usually referred to as the “MTV Generation.” You’ll get no argument from me about that appellation. God knows I spent more than my fair share of time before the television set demanding my MTV.

Decades before the ‘M’ in the name fell silent and it became the “All Ridiculousness, All the Time” network, MTV was where you went to find the newest and hippest music. Granted, MTV was less than diligent in playing music by black artists in its early years (as David Bowie pointed out in his interview with Marc Goodman), but the network learned over time how to pull in music from a (fairly) wide range of genres – alternative music featured on 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps played the latest hip/hop videos, and even the kooky, twenty-year-old schtick of someone like Arthur Brown found room in the rotation.

There was also a time when the ‘M’ in MTV stood not only for music but for monsters, as well. Monster kids had plenty of spooky fare to choose from. Artists from across the musical spectrum used the stars of the creature features for their videos, even if the songs didn’t really have much to do with horror.

Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride appeared in “Doing It All for My Baby” by Huey Lewis and the News – an 8-minute video with a nearly 4-minute, non-musical lead-in.

For his video “Think I’m in Love,” Eddie Money played a Dracula-like lead character who has his toothsome tables turned on him.

Men at Work delivered a Jekyll and Hyde video (natch) for “Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive” that owed more to Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor than the Robert Louis Stevenson story.

Ozzy Osbourne went the Hammer Film Studios route for his video “Bark at the Moon.”

Sheena Easton threw all of the monsters into a blender (including King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Thing from The Addams Family) for her black-and-white, Gothic-flavored video “Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair).”

While these (white) musicians looked to the monsters of the past for their imagery and inspiration, hip/hop artists DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince used a monster of a more recent vintage for “A Nightmare on my Street.”

To be continued next Monday…