Recently, over at a site called Movie Line I saw two videos on the 1983 HBO movie intro sequence — both the opener itself, and a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made. For anyone with even the slightest bit of 80′s nostalgia (of the sort I’ve been chronicling in my Movies of a Misspent Youth series of reviews) the classic HBO intro with its little model village and triumphalist synth disco beat might just cause your soon-to-be-middle-aged heart to flutter with excitement. It did mine.
I barely recall the happy family in the beginning of this one, I believe HBO at some point realized their grandiose vision was maybe a bit too much to sit through a dozen times a week and cut the sequence back. After a while, most viewers had spotted all the hookers and stray dogs in the toy village and were no doubt getting impatient, and by then cable television was well on its way to looking a bit more like it does now. You’d never see anything that long or self-important today.
The featurette on the making of the intro is a great look at old school SFX, and it’s remarkable to look back on an age where everything is hand-made and mechanical. Heinousity warning on the music for this one though, it may cause internal injuries.
A quick dig around youtube produced the intro sequence that replaced the model village and swirly ‘O,’ the quicker-to-the-point 1987 light show that is just as ingrained in my memory (and maybe yours).
There are others, both before and after, to be found on youtube (including an April Fool’s parody of the 1983 village), but these are the ones I remember most.
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I remember watching two behind the scenes on how HBO openings were made. This one and the one before it. This one with the village stands out in my memory, though, for sure.
Weird.
I remember watching this, “making of” with the village when it first aired. I think you nailed it with the “self-important” tag. Nice to see the opening again after all this time, though. Yeah, way longer than anything you’d see today.
Talk about a nostalgia trip! These are great Bill, thanks for sharing.
Kevin, the opening before the village was sort of that swirly marquee, wasn’t it?
Glad you guys liked it — I haven’t seen these since they originally went off the air I’m sure, and they brought a nice little nostalgia surge to the old way back engine.
I also saw this documentary about the logo when it first aired. It was before Fraggle Rock‘s premiere on HBO. I do remember the family in the house, and noted about a year later that they had vanished.
You’ve got a better memory than me, Ryan. And I bet I saw the debut of Fraggle Rock.