MTM Home Video
Just to prove that not everything is doom and gloom down here at The Spirochaete Trail (and because, god knows, after two consecutive apocalypse-themed entries and another one about a dead cat, I could use a little lift myself), here's an MTM logo featuring Mimsie the kitten in healthier, sprightlier days (albeit posthumously, as Mimsie herself was four years deceased by the time this particular variant appeared).
After years of licensing their productions to other companies to distribute on home video, MTM Enterprises finally established their own home media unit in 1992 (round about the same time that International Family Entertainment were in the process of getting their hands on them) under the moniker of MTM Home Video. Now whenever you purchased a VHS of Hill Street Blues or Newhart, you were treated to a brand new logo variant where, instead of just one insanely adorable dose of Mimsie mewing, you got two, thanks to the power of rewind technology (thanks to the power of freeze frame technology, you might also be able to pick out a few images of Mimsie for use in creepypastas). I can see more than a smidgen of freakiness potential in the sudden switch to black and white and the high-pitch backwards squeaking during the rewinding portion of the sequence, but overall it's hard to get too unnerved when it's sandwiched between two heavily saturated slices of pure, unadulterated cuteness such as this. Really precious.
Carlton Your Doorman
MTM's only foray into a fully animated production was a one-off half-hour special dedicated to the perpetually off-screen doorman from their 1974 sitcom Rhoda. To fans of Rhoda it would have been a fairly big deal as it provided the first in-person glimpses (albeit in animated form) of a character who in the series proper was only ever heard talking across an intercom (imagine if Frasier had followed suit and given Maris her own cartoon special after that series wrapped). As in Rhoda, Carlton's voice was provided by Lorenzo Music, most famous for voicing Garfield in numerous 1980s TV specials and the 1988 series Garfield and Friends.
Carlton Your Doorman aired on CBS on 21st May 1980, picked up a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program and then promptly disappeared off the face of the Earth. If MTM intended this special as a pilot for a possible primetime animated sitcom then nothing came of it (although it is fascinating to contemplate that an attempt was made to revive the genre long before The Simpsons pulled it off in 1989) and the special has apparently never been re-aired in the US (judging from the "Yorkshire Television" ident in the clip below, however, it evidently received an additional airing in the UK). Carlton Your Doorman now enjoys something of a legendary status among animation fans, who regard it as a "lost" special (which in this case simply means that anyone who fortuitously happened to get the full special on tape isn't being very forthcoming in uploading it to YouTube).
As of now, the special survives in the form of tiny bits and pieces, including the opening clip below and the custom MTM logo variant, in which Carlton's cat Ringo is seen filling in for Mimsie. The gag here being that Ringo is everything that Mimsie isn't - he's big, scruffy and violently-tempered, and to make matters worse he won't even meow on cue. Damn cat indeed.
Side-note: should Carlton Your Doorman ever show up in its entirety, I'll happily review it. I've been making the same promise about Fox's failed pilot Hollywood Dog (1990) for a while now.
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