TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Sign-Offs Through the Years - 1990 (WLBT/Jackson, MS)

Posted to YouTube by user 'jacky9br'
Length - 8:29

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off sequence for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

And throughout 2018, we are featuring "Sign-Offs Through the Years", as we go year-by-year with each successive week.

As we enter the 1990s in "Sign-Offs Through the Years", here is is a somewhat longer sign-off sequence from Jackson, Mississippi, NBC affiliate WLBT. It begins with a few promos: for "Saturday Night Live" (which was in its 15th anniversary season) featuring guest host Rob Lowe and Dana Carvey in full church-lady dress; for the NBC Sports presentation of The Players Championship golf tourney; and for local WLBT 3 News. These are followed by two PSAs, for a women's shelter called New Life for Women and for the Special Olympics.

A "Sanford & Son" promo slide precedes a very strange ownership/technical voiceover. After a title card with a personal dedication for the sign-off (something mischievous master control operators would sometimes slip in), a segment begins playing with special effects and the title "Purple Haze" with audio of the band Winger doing a cover of the Jimi Hendrix song of the same name. Midway through this clip, a brief ownership/technical voiceover is heard.

The sequence is capped off  by a very nice national anthem film that features local/regional images of Mississippi, including several shots of a rainbow-striped hot air balloon with the name of the state emblazoned on it.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Station Sign-Off from WAFF/Huntsville-Decatur, AL (1979)

Posted to YouTube by user 'robatsea2009'
Length - 4:52

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off segment for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

This sign-off from 1979 for northern Alabama station WAFF begins with a few NBC program promos: for an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" (NBC hadn't started to use the "very special episode" trope yet, but if they had, this one would've qualified), for the prime-time special for the 17th anniversary of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson", and for NFL Football on NBC Sports.

A locally-branded bumper for "News 48" sports leads into a short religious segment called "A Seed for the Sower" coming from somewhere called the "Guido Evangelistic Association" in Georgia. The ownership/technical voiceover follows, on images from a TV master control room (WAFF's, presumably). The national anthem film closes out the sequence, with a rather spare piano rendition over stock images of monuments, military transports, and natural wilderness ("Courtesy of the Army National Guard").

TFTP Sports: MLB Game of the Week, Phillies vs. Cardinals from NBC (Apr. 15, 1978)

Posted to YouTube by user 'ClassicMLB11'

Now that Memorial Day has passed, and summer is truly upon us, TFTP says: Play Ball! This game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies from early in the 1978 season of Major League Baseball is a great example of late-1970s baseball in the astroturf and double-knit era. The game takes place at St. Louis's Busch Memorial Stadium, which was one of the typical all-purpose, multi-use stadiums of the time. The Phillies' reddish-purple "P" logo seen here was an iconic part of period baseball uniforms (as was the powder-blue coloration it was paired with); the Cards' uniforms here, on the other hand, look pretty much the same as they do now (and as they always have).

This game is also a great example of how sports broadcasts from earlier periods can seem peculiar to us now, as they lack the polish and graphical sophistication that we have come to expect. For instance, something like not having the score (and in the case of baseball, the strike/ball count) constantly onscreen--which are onscreen continuously and universally, for the most part, on sports broadcasts now--seems odd and disorienting when we are so used to being able to refer to it at any time while watching.

A great deal about this broadcast from 1978 seems familiar, though: the play-by-play and commentary from Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek, the camera angles from which the action is shown, the use of slow-motion instant replay--all of these are used in this now nearly-forty-year-old sportscast in almost exactly the same way they would be today.

As far as the game itself, we're not going to spoil it by naming the winner of this ten-inning contest. But the Phillies were at a high point in the late-1970s, in the middle of their Mike Schmidt heyday, with Tug McGraw pitching here and Larry Bowa contributing. A final fun fact: ten days after this game, on Apr. 25, 1978, was the debut of the Phillies' legendary mascot the Phillie Phanatic.