Can you spot all the edits made to this CBS Sunday Movie opener by Seven?
First there’s the Seven ident just hanging around for a few seconds longer than normal to cover up the ‘CBS’ text at the beginning of the opener. It looks very dodgy and unprofessional - almost like they’ve forgotten to switch to the right video source in time.
Then at the end, instead of the colourful zoom with those streaks of light into the title card, they just fade in the ‘Sunday Night Movie’ title card with a very minimal zoom effect, which is obviously to replace the ‘CBS Sunday Night Movies’ thing.
It looks like Seven made a composite image (either via some film compositing or a video effect) from frames of the video where the words are ‘zoomed’ into, based on how the height of each line of text isn’t uniform.
You can see Seven has lopped the ‘S’ off of ‘MOVIES’. I can very faintly on my screen that the glow from those lights inside the ‘Movies’ text seems to taper off a bit more abruptly in that direction compared to the lines above, which seem to continue all the way to the edge of the 4:3 frame.
Interestingly, I don’t really remember seeing any of those Idents (aside from the standard “Red/Sunday” Ident left on at the end) on TV.
Anyway, here’s a few old Nine Sports promos which have also recently been uploaded to the YouTube channel of Graham Cousens (who from the info I can gather online, was Nine’s Creative Director between 1993 and 2005!) which might be of interest:
State Of Origin 2 Promo, June 1994:
“Come On Aussie” Cricket Promo from later that year, including a brief look at the internal countdown + slate/cue card graphic at the start:
Probably just in my head, but it really sounds like the sound effect in the background is saying ‘fuck you’ at the end of the promo at around the 27 second mark.
In isolation there were good bits. But the hard changeover from the previous top class package with also the logo change meant it was destined to fail.
How long did “Come Date With Me” even last for? Because I’ve got no recollection of that whatsoever!
The only good thing about The Shire and Being Lara Bingle (also that “Brynne’s Bedazzled Life” show airing on Channel Seven around the same time) were some of the hilarious online comments about the shows being trashy and cringeworthy! Aside from that, I’m glad we’ve moved on from those…
I’m thinking that not many other shows have survived from just 5 years ago. More specifically what post 7.30pm commercial TV shows that were on air in 2012 have made it to 2017? I can immediately think of the reality franchises MKR, Block and MC and a couple of factuals. What happened to everything else?
Very simplistic question you’re getting at, as there are multiple reasons why regional television is close to dying in the bum…
The big 6 (I’m assuming you mean the 3 metros and Southern Cross, Prime and WIN) are part of the reason but not the whole reason. And even then, you need to discount Ten as they have never owned a regional station. The bigger 2 (Seven and Nine) have always wanted to get a foothold in country TV, if only to build relays of their metro stations with little to no local programs. They were involved in a lot of license applications when stations were called for e.g. one of the rivals for what was NBN-3’s license came from a Nine/2NX-2NM consortium. Thankfully wiser heads prevailed back then but eventually, they had their wish…stations are now little more than relays of the metros with little local content, which, if they could, they’d get rid of.
The process of aggregation itself was flawed. Certain areas of the country were excluded from the process, even though they had stations linked with aggregated operations e.g. MTN Griffith, Prime’s Cobar translator and STV Mildura. It also came a bad point finance wise after the Stockmarket crash of the late eighties and capital may have been harder to get.
The issues of political ineptitude and points scoring come into it. Remember, aggregation was a easy vote winner for Labor in country areas - who’s really going to say no to more TV channels back in those days? - plus it had the added benefit of jamming it up the Country (National) Party, as country TV was seen as a haven for their supporters. Plus both sides have feigned minimal interest of fixing any issues that have come up (like local content rules) only when it suited them, otherwise they’ve done SFA to improve regional broadcasting.
Finally, you now have the added twist of metros being able to broadcast nationwide via the web and apps and not allowing the regionals to make any sort of money via rebroadcasting from the exact same process. They should be able to if they’re smart, like streaming the regional services in the same manner and using the GPS function to lock the user into using the “local” stream. And the usual suspects of Google and Facebook and Netflix and Stan and torrenting and the programming simply sucking harder than a Dyson.
There will be people here that will be able to explain more than what I can and rightfully tear me to shreds on this, but I think what I’m trying to say is that there are many more things that can explain why regional TV is dying in the backside than the two you’ve described.
