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Classic Video Thread (pre-2008)


Jess

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WTHR 10pm (!!) open, 1991 (We Know What Matters). I had to look this one up — it turns out WTHR did an early prime experiment of its own!

 

 

You can thank a majority of the state of Indiana for not observing Daylight Saving Time until just a few years ago.

 

By not "springing forward", the Indianapolis TV market, along with Fort Wayne, South Bend, Terre Haute, and Lafayette, would end up with network primetime beginning at 7pm, ala Central Time, instead of 8pm Eastern Time. All of the markets would juggle their schedules around when they lost the 7pm-8pm 'prime access', and syndicated programming, like Jeopardy!, would be moved to an afternoon slot from the usual 7pm or 7:30pm spot.

 

Of course this affected the scheduling of news in Indianapolis. Obviously 11pm newscasts would move back an hour to 10pm, and even "The Ten O'Clock News" on WTTV (during their first go-around of local news) would become "The Nine O'Clock News". (I think WXIN-then WPDS's short-lived "59 Headline News" also did this). When it came to evenings, and depending on the station, the network newscasts would either just move back an hour to 5:30pm (in the case of WTHR after it became an NBC affiliate), or delayed until 6pm (as was the case for a few years on both WRTV and WISH which had news for an hour at 5pm). Network morning shows (Today, GMA, whatever CBS was doing) would be an hour behind, and would be tape-delayed to 7am "Indiana" time (as opposed to airing live at 6am central).

 

Someone decided to end the insanity, at least as far as television programming in the late '80s, and *most* of the Indianapolis stations decided to standardize their schedules year-round to an 8pm-11pm (for Fox, 8pm-10pm) schedule. WTHR, then in the ratings basement, tried to buck the trend for a while, by following the 'old' springtime schedule and airing primetime an hour earlier, and thus having news at 10pm. They expanded the show to an hour, with news competition coming from WTTV, which had also standardized to an all-Eastern time schedule. In the Fall, WTHR would switch back to an 8pm-11pm primetime and 11pm half hour newscast.

 

WTHR finally gave in and standardized their schedule with the other stations. Not long after, the other markets followed suit (in Terre Haute, WTWO was the first to do so, while WFFT in Fort Wayne had been airing Fox programming from 8pm-10pm for a number of years).

 

Evansville, on the other hand, always followed central time year-round.

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Evansville, on the other hand, always followed central time year-round.

That's because the area encompassing most of the Evansville DMA in southwest Indiana (aside from, I think, 2 counties to the north and northwest) are actually "zoned" to central time.

 

IIRC, until 2005 the state allowed the individual counties to decide for themselves whether to observe daylight savings. That's why SW Indiana, and the counties that border metro Chicago in NW Indiana, followed it while the rest of the state did not.

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A compilation of news intros used by ORF in Austria from 1957 to the present day (Note that one of the themes is Dignity by Network Music / Killer Tracks):

 

 

And a 1980s ORF news open that's missing from the compilation above:

 

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WPRI 1991, News Series 2000. Is this Beau Weaver? Earliest open from WPRI with this package I've seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmZy4NlbxUU

 

I'm not 100% sure on the beginning ID, but the actual open is very definitely him. Sounds at least somewhat similar to his VTS package era WFLD work.

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I'm not 100% sure on the beginning ID, but the actual open is very definitely him. Sounds at least somewhat similar to his VTS package era WFLD work.

 

The reason I even suggested it was because Narragansett ran WPRI and WTKR sort of similarly from a design/presentation standpoint.

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The reason I even suggested it was because Narragansett ran WPRI and WTKR sort of similarly from a design/presentation standpoint.

 

It seems probable to me that at least some of their graphics came from the same place - there seems to be a fair bit of TVbD influence in the WPRI open (compare its background color scheme with the 1990 KPNX work), and we already know some of what WTKR had at the time was heavily drawn from the same formula.

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The reason I even suggested it was because Narragansett ran WPRI and WTKR sort of similarly from a design/presentation standpoint.

 

Here's WTKR's open from around the same time for comparison. It's pretty similar, just a little more fast-paced. This debuted in early 1992 (Jan/Feb)

 

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Here's WTKR's open from around the same time for comparison. It's pretty similar, just a little more fast-paced. This debuted in early 1992 (Jan/Feb)

 

 

It also uses a lot more 3D. The WPRI open is unusual for being an all-2D open at this time but it does have a strong TVbD influence to it.

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WJAR News Open Compilation (1974-2014)

 

Tale note at :20 because it shows a news open featuring a theme that WTVX used for its newscasts in the mid 1980s.

 

And now we have another sample of it, no less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFOOUJhy0s

 

This was posted on another board I frequent. Features assorted KGMB and KHON snippets from the 1986 and 1994 tsunami events. Notably, at several points the KHON 1995 theme appears ahead of schedule: https://vimeo.com/25043699#t=256s

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Here's a doozy. This is a documentary produced by WBKB Chicago in 1967 looking at the corruption and poor conditions within the Cook County Jail. Hosted by a 33 year old Joel Daly, this aired the year before WBKB would become WLS. Some of the content is surprisingly graphic for its time, including violence, drugs, and sex, and it's certainly a sharp departure from the "Happy Talk" Eyewitness News format that the station would help pioneer soon after.

 

[yt]lHTvvzozBnk[/yt]

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If US military news is your thing, here's some FEN (Far East Network) News from Iwakuni, Japan, 1990. The news theme is pieces of two different Network Music tracks. The guy who uploaded these items anchored.

 

The same newscast. This is definitely more 1990, not 1980:

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WRTV 1989 promo. The music was used by KUSA around this time as an open bump. Production or network track?

 

Interesting there would be a Denver/Indianapolis Crossover with that music...This AND the WRTV 1990 news theme.

 

Both KMGH (which was CBS at the time) and WRTV are ABC affiliates, which used to be owned by McGraw Hill. Now, KMGH and WRTV are owned by Scripps, which is the company that used to own the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News newspaper.

 

KUSA (ABC at the time, now it's NBC) used that same music track for the 9NEWS tonight intro (

), and Channel 9 also used the WRTV 1990 News theme for it's 4PM local talk show Good Afternoon Colorado.

 

Even before ABC moved from KUSA to KMGH in 1995, it's interesting that KUSA would use theme music from rival KMGH's sister station in Indianapolis.

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