This Is Home Box Office.

Okay, readers. It's time for the nerdiest post yet (but certainly not the nerdiest I'll ever write). Can you handle it?!

As you all know, HBO is probably the biggest cable network ever. However, this post isn't really about HBO. Rather, it's about its bumpers, on-air graphics and movie intros, a few of which I'll be showing you thanks to all those other retro lovers out there on Youtube.

Home Box Office signed on for the first time in 1972. Can you believe it's been around that long? Neither can I. I thought it started a few years later, like many other networks. Anyway, check out this rare ID. It's from the 70s, back when the "O" in "HBO" still overlapped the "B". That damn O sure was an attention whore. I dig those rainbow stripes though. Very old-school.

Couldn't find it on Youtube, so check it out on RetroJunk!

Another common misconception is that HBO was always a 24/7 network, but it actually didn't start that until December 1981, nine years after its inception.

What that means is that at one point in time, HBO had a sign-off sequence! This blew my mind when I first found out about it on the internet. Not because it's a stellar example of animation (it's not), but because the idea of a pay channel signing off at night is really bizarre. Also, it seems like something of a rip-off, especially when you consider that HBO cost around 12 bucks a month back then, which, in 2007 money, translates to roughly 3000 dollars. Oh well. Check out the video anyway!



(If you'd rather go to Youtube and watch the video, or if the embed doesn't work for you, just click here.)

Alright, you want to see something really dated? Check this next video out. Apparently this clip was recorded in late 1980, but the 70s aesthetic was still going strong. This thing is funktastic. Also, is it just me or does that little theme for the movie intro bear some resemblance to the Star Trek theme music? Listen for it when the words "HBO Feature Movie" come on the screen.



(Again, if that doesn't work, go here.)

Oh, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Here's the cream of the crop. The crown jewel. The mother of all the HBO logos, graphics, and intros. If you were alive in the 80s at all, chances are you remember seeing this thing at least once. My parents didn't even subscribe to HBO and I managed to see it. I don't remember when. I don't remember where. But I saw this thing once at some point during my childhood and I never forgot it. I remember wishing that I could see it again, but I don't think I ever did until I found it on RetroJunk at the beginning of my big retro craze. Needless to say, this just added more fuel to the fire.

Anyway, here it is: the glorious HBO Feature Presentation movie intro, aka "HBO in space".



(Or go here.

If you don't think that was one of the most awesome things you've ever seen, then you can just get the hell out of here right now.

Not only is it fucking epic, it also features one of the most exquisitely crafted models I've ever seen. That's right, it ain't CGI, kids. That thing was built in 1982 by hand with blood, sweat, and tears. Or...maybe just hammer, nails, and paint. Even the flying HBO logo that almost crashes through the screen at the end is a model.

Anyway, it's visually impressive even today, but the music is what really makes it amazing. Every hear it, I get chills. And then I feel like watching something huge like Poltergeist, Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There also happens to be a really cool behind-the-scenes look at the making of this thing, which you can look at here if you like that nerdy kind of thing (which I do!).

Also, HBO might have taken themselves very seriously when they made that, but they also had a sense of humor: they made more than one parody of this intro for April Fool's Day. Here's one of them. Go look at it, dammit! Or the giant HBO logo will come for you in your sleep.

I have more clips, but I think I'll end this one here. I don't want to scare away the last two people that are reading this thing. Plus, it's late and I'm hungry. I promise the next post won't be quite as nerdy as this. If you appreciated this post in any way, please leave me a damn comment and tell me so I don't have to strangle myself with an old VHS tape.

Peanuts taste good.

I feel like rambling about random stuff instead of doing a full-fledged article-style post. I dunno if this experiment will be a success, but what the hell. I'm bored, okay? Cut me some slack.

Well, the first thing I'll mention is that I couldn't find the re-release of Poltergeist. Granted, I only looked at this crappy small-town Wal-Mart and not at my beloved Hastings like usual, but still. However, while browsing the DVD aisles hoping maybe a copy of it would magically appear, I came across something just as good: the Peanuts holiday specials box set. For 20 bucks. Which is the best price I've ever seen for it. (God bless you and your low, low prices, Wal-Mart.) Since I've been wanting to buy it for years, but could never justify shelling out the ridiculous amounts of cash most places were asking for it, I decided to put off Poltergeist for a couple of weeks and buy this gem instead.

So, having nothing to do today, I watched all three of the DVDs in the set. I'm actually pretty impressed with the releases, barebones as they are. You can hardly tell that the Christmas and Halloween specials are 40 years old. The picture and sound are quite nice.

Watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was almost like a whole new experience. Apparently, all these years they've been editing stuff out of it, and I never even knew about it. There was at least five minutes' worth of stuff in there that I'd never seen before. I had it recorded back in the 80s, but I think parts of it were cut off due to editing out the commercials and stuff. So getting a big dose of nostalgia while at the same time seeing something new was a lot of fun.

Anyway, even though it cost me 20 of my precious dollars, I'm really glad I bought this, because I haven't seen these specials in years and I never manage to catch them on television. They come when you're not expecting them and are gone before you know what happened. Kinda like ninjas. Ninjas that drag around a blue security blanket.

Also, it just feels...wrong watching them on ABC as opposed to CBS. That's nerdy, I know, but I think we've established the fact that I'm one of the nerdiest people on the planet when it comes to retro crap. Admittedly, it felt a little weird watching them on DVD too, and the absence of the famous "CBS Special Presentation" logo is most certainly felt. Also missing is the logo for the local CBS affiliate and the little map of Oklahoma in the corner that showed weather warnings. If I could somehow score copies of these specials on VHS that included all that stuff plus commercial breaks, I think I could die happy.

Here's where I change topics by making a confession: I am a huge nerd. No really, I am. I collect old station IDs, bumpers, promos, commercials, eyecatches, and the like. I also collect some production logos-- those logos you see at the end of shows, like "DiC" and stuff. My videos folder has 142 files in it; 99% of them are this kind of stuff. I have station IDs from places I've never been to, some from before I was even born.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term "station ID", I'll explain briefly. The FCC requires television stations to identify themselves at least once per hour, providing their call letters (KOCO, KFOR, etc) and city. In the 70s and 80s, there were a lot of independent TV stations that had their own identities: slogans, logos, jingles, and animations, which were incorporated into their station IDs.

I don't really know why I became so fascinated by them. Maybe because they're a lost art. Some older ones use a technique called slit-scan animation that fell out of use with the rise of CGI. It has major retro-cool factor. Some of them are great examples of early CGI, and when I look at them I think, "Wow, they could do this stuff back then?"

Or maybe it's because some of my earliest memories are of that kind of thing.

Now, I've always liked 80s stuff a whole lot, and I started getting nostalgic for my early childhood when I was still in high school. But then I kinda forgot about it for a while, until one day about two years ago, when I was puttering around on the internet and got linked to retrojunk.com. I was poking around in the videos section and came across something that had been stuck in the back of my mind since I was two years old: CBS's Saturday morning bumpers for the 1984-1985 season.



Watch them here. I command it!

When I saw those again, I got all emotional and watched the video about a zillion times while wondering how in the hell I managed to remember something so seemingly insignificant for so many years.

And that's what started this whole obsession with retro stuff. So now you know.

I actually have been planning to write about some of these IDs and logos that I hold so dear, and now that I've got my secret out in the open, it should be a lot easier to do so. Be on the lookout for it pretty soon.