Circa 1989: Our last segment for MTV News would also turn out to be our most-viewed Toby clip. It aired during MTV’s Spring Break coverage, which was fairly huge at the time. Our MTV producer told me that this particular segment would most likely have been viewed close to 4.5 million times during the weekend that it aired!
This was also the segment that was used in the American Splendor movie to represent Toby’s “MTV era.” The film’s producers—HBO Films and Good Machine—called MTV to see if they could send them some Toby video to include in the film. It had been quite some time since the original Toby segments had aired, so MTV didn’t have anything in their archives. The producers then contacted me to see if I had anything—Toby and I were still making weird videos, this time for the web, so we were easy to find. I only had the original segments as they aired, recorded on VHS from the original MTV broadcasts of The Week in Rock. I sent them those and even came up with the (hopefully-bright) idea that they could film the VHS videos playing on a TV monitor so that they could have a “hi-res” version of the footage. They thought it was an awesome idea and ended up doing just that. Excuse me while I pat myself on the back! 😂
