CineFile Video

With all this recent talk on this blog of cable TV memories, I thought I’d make some of the haziness a little more concrete. Here’s some audio from vintage HBO promos and bumpers that are sure to evoke some Pavlovian responses out of you —

HBO In Space (”Feature Presentation”): This is the “floating in space thing” that HBO would show before almost every single feature film, from sometime between 1983 and the late ’80s. There were three versions: the 60-second flying-through-the-cityscape-and-then-onto-the-floating-HBO-logo version, the 30-second space-only version, and the 70-second one that was a mirror of the 60-second one, only with a short scene of a family turning on the TV and sitting down (shot through a living room window) tacked onto the very beginning. The 30-second one is the one they showed most often, but here for download is the full 60-second version.

“HBO In Space” feature presentation bumper music (MP3)

HBO Movie bumper, late 1980s: This one’s got more plastic pompery, what with the neon glow and the shredding guitar solo. This one got heavy play up until sometime in the mid-’90s. Cinefile employee Damon instantly recognized what this was by name, after only hearing the first few seconds of it from across the store.

“HBO Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Movie Marquee & Coming Up Next On HBO, early 1980s: These go back a little further than I can remember. My family got cable in the household in ‘83, around the time the “HBO In Space” thing premiered.

“HBO Movie Marquee” feature presentation bumper music, early 1980s (MP3)
“Coming Up Next On HBO” bumper, early 1980s (MP3)

The Best Time On TV Is HBO, late 1980s(?): Someone in the HBO head offices must’ve absolutely loved the work of painter Piet Mondrian with a passion, for the graphic look that the channel adopted for almost a year reflected a direct rip-off of his aesthetic. Check out the faux pleasure with which the session singer nearly blows a load in his pants over HBO!

“The Best Time On TV Is HBO” promo, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Video Jukebox, 1981-1986: According to Wikipedia, “a typical episode of ‘Video Jukebox’ consisted of seven or eight music videos and lasted roughly 30 minutes, and the lineup changed in the middle of each month…[i]n the late 1970s (and before the MTV network debuted), HBO was already airing one or two music videos (or ‘promotional clips’ as they were known at the time) as filler in between their feature films and other series. These short clips also carried the ‘Video Jukebox’ moniker. When Video Jukebox premiered as a half-hour series in December 1981, HBO reached more households than MTV (which was launched only four months earlier), so a video that aired on Video Jukebox actually received more exposure than it would on MTV, a claim that would be short-lived as MTV quickly gained more cable markets…[a]t the peak of its popularity in the mid-1980s, Video Jukebox spawned many ’special edition’, including Christmas Jukebox, Country Jukebox, Comedy Jukebox and other editions featuring songs from movies and Grammy winners.” Here’s the brief theme music from both versions of the show’s opening credits through its five-year run.

“HBO Video Jukebox” themes, 1981-1986 (MP3)

No Place Like HBO commercial, early 1980s: I don’t know if this saccharine jingle (done in the popular commercial spot style of the time) was something that only aired on HBO itself, or if it was on network TV at the time, in order to entice new customers to the then-burgeoning subscription service. Kenny Rogers makes a cameo appearance (visual only, not singing) in the montage of folks of various ethnicities plopping themselves down in front of a TV in order to regale themselves with entertainment from the likes of pay cable.

“No Place Like HBO” promo, early 1980s (MP3)

Inside HBO, early 1980s: At the time, most everyone was “new” to pay movie channels, so HBO thought it needed to explain to cable subscriber neophytes exactly how the laws of HBO physics worked. The channel produced a series of animated FAQ-style promo spots that answered such questions as “Why does HBO show things it’s shown before in the past?” and “Why does HBO show movies I haven’t heard of before?” Such questions seem ridiculously quaint now, in light of our current media culture avalanche. Here’s a montage of four of these “Inside HBO” question-answering spots.

“Inside HBO” montage, early 1980s (MP3)

Cinemax Movie bumper, late 1980s: Wikipedia sez: “Cinemax launched in August 1980, introduced by its then on-air personality Robert Kulp. Kulp told viewers that Cinemax would be about movies and nothing but movies. At the time, HBO featured a wider range of programming, including documentaries, children’s entertainment, sporting events, and entertainment specials…Movie classics were a mainstay of [Cinemax] at its birth, “all uncut and commercial-free” as Kulp would say. A heavy schedule of films from the 50s-70s made up most of Cinemax’s program schedule.” Cinemax was often way cooler than HBO for me as a child, mainly because they simply showed a better selection of stuff — AND had the Max Headroom talk show! I remember catching this particular bumper in front of movies that I would watch at a certain friend’s house as a kid; my parents had the HBO cable package, but never wanted to cough up the extra dough for Cinemax.

“Cinemax Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Movie Music Archives, My Cable Daze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.