Leaderboard

Plus you have to haul and lug all those flags, and you have to keep track of the stand-ups making sure they match stations, you have to be cautious of outdated logos or network affiliation switches. ...and if and when you screw one up...it's all YOUR fault. How about just No mic flag and a nice new black Electro VoiceRE-50... Or a nice new black RE-50 and a generic Nexstar flag?

Someone posted an idea for a "sports classic video" thread on the shoutbox a few days ago. I like the idea, but I wanted to expand it a little bit. The focus of the existing classic video thread is on news and broadcast TV stations. This is, essentially, "everything else". Premium cable promos, MTV "vidchecks", sports promos and graphics, everything within reason. Obviously let's not post full game shows or compilations of production company logos. So! I'll start with three examples of the above. I had, like, five examples of premium cable promos but I ultimately went with this one. Why? I think mid-80s Movie Channel stuff is underrated. The theme music is great and the movie open is fantastic, and it's interesting to see bits of a channel that never quite found a niche. (Even a rebrand effort from the great Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman didn't really quite take off.) Here's a nice and long MTV "vidcheck" from 1982. For those who don't quite get the concept, it's sort of similar to a "scoped aircheck" of a radio station. In other words, the songs are more or less removed (well, most of them - there's enough to let you know what the song is), but everything else isn't. So this is the VJ banter, commercials, and promos from that era. It's interesting to note how tame it is in comparison to how MTV was later in the decade. The formatics are very, very similar to radio. Lots of VJ segments, lots of promos, pretty high on the music content (and before I get the obligatory "well, duh, this is when they actually played music" comments, I want to stress that this is in comparison to how they were much later in the decade, when there were much more commercials, promos, and news breaks.) Ok, so "full sports broadcast" might not exactly be "within reason" but bear with me here. I wanted to spotlight the 1993-95 ABC Sports look, and the best way to do it was with this, a full bowling telecast from 1993. Cheesy Professional Bowlers Tour theme song aside, this look has aged like fine wine. I've mentioned ABC Sports' theme music from this period many, many times... but I'm going to mention it again because it is simply my favorite piece of television production music. Period. But I also wanted to note the graphics, which is why I'm posting this in full. Like I said, it's aged like fine wine. With a few adjustments you could be using these today - and more or less, Fox Sports IS using these graphics today. The resemblance is striking. I'll take crisp and clean graphics like these over overdone gloss and dancing robots any day of the week.

I thought about where I should be posting this, but with James Ingram's recent passing, I finally put 2 and 2 together in his involvement with the "Give Me 5" promo https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/legendary-r-b-singer-james-ingram-sang-in-promotional-video-for-news-5-in-1995 WEWS claims Carly Simon did vocals...but it is definitely NOT her. I believe it's Andrea McArdle, the then-wife of Edd Kalehoff who was the original Annie in the Broadway musical, and sang lead vocals on Edd's "4 New York" campaign released several years earlier. This was a great promo that had a limited shelf life due to the Browns' being yanked out of the city that year. Not to mention, it was probably expensive. (WJLA had a campaign with Jeffrey Osborne back in the 80s that wasn't renewed due to $$$)

NBA on NBC doubleheader promo from February 3, 1996 https://youtu.be/I48I3sX4ziw

The fourth girl in the front is covering it with her hand... it's just the big 8 with woodtv.com in white on the corners... Very similar to sister station WLNS.. theirs is a big 6 with wlns.com in white in the corners

Maybe a nice teak or oak?

KDFW, too. The news theme and promo song were also heard in San Francisco, but on different stations. KTVU used the news theme for their weekend 6:00; and KOFY had the promo.

This commercial block from WUHF from September 28, 1984 is the earliest recording I've seen of any station using Turn To News. There's also a full 1-min image sing at 5:15:

I know someone has shared some video from this site before but McMillen and Wife’s Pittsburgh Steelers Fansite has TONS of vintage Pittsburgh Steeler games on their site recorded off of Pittsburgh TV stations mostly from WIIC/WPXI as they were the Steelers flagship station for preseason games and regular season NBC games. You can skim through games and find a lot of vintage ads, which is how I have my avatar pic. www.mcmillenandwife.com