In episode 172 of the podcast, I talked about the Fox Network, and at one point, I played part of the “It’s on Fox!” promo that first ran in 1990 and was a showcase for their then-new five nights a week programming. I’ve seen promotions like this in the years since, like when the WB and UPN premiered in the mid-1990s, and old promos for the big three networks that made the rounds on YouTube. With the exception of “It’s on Fox!”, I don’t remember most of them.

On the other hand, I clearly remember some of the promotional commercials for my local television stations. Since I was watching the NYC stations, they were fairly well-produced, catchy, and reran a lot during commercial breaks, especially in the late afternoon when I was watching cartoons, sitcoms, and the news.

Syndicated stations usually had the most of these, and often ran advertisements for specifical programming blocks. You’d have “A full hour of The Simpsons every night on Fox 5″ or “The Brady Bunch Hour on Channel 11.” Then there were special movie months like Shocktober. In fact, Channel 11 was the best with these ads as well as station theming (they were “11 Alive” for a number of years in the Seventies and Eighties). My favorite had to be the commercial that was simply a montage of slows WPIX aired set to Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love.” I’m sure nobody else but me remembers it; in fact, I can’t find it anywhere.

But what I could find were two ad campaigns from the late Eighties and early Nineties for WABC and WNBC, channels 7 and 4 in New York.

The first is for Channel 7’s Eyewitness News and was called “There Goes That News Van Again.”

I’m sure that people who grew up in the Tri-State Area recognize this commercial. And I think my favorite part is where the narrator says that Ethel is eating “one of those calamarees” when it’s obviously a “cannoli.” My dad would never mispronounce cannoli, but he does have a habit of mispronouncing words.

Anyway, this promo wasn’t just for the New York area; it was used for a number of ABC affiliates (I found one for Philadelphia, for example) and sometime later there would be a version set to the official U.S. Army song “The Army Goes Rolling Along” with “There goes that news van again” substituting for the title. It was successful enough that Channel 7 kept updating it for a few decades. In some cases, it was a new song, like the one that used freestyle rap and paint buckets:

And repeated versions of people in the city saying, “There goes that news van again!”:

I will say that the car commercial satire one is actually pretty genius:

I think the promo is memorable because it’s so whimsical. All of my local stations here have promos that are about advertising their news team as a brand you can trust or bringing you the important things first or covering what you need to see. It’s all so very hard core. Aggressive even.

But the crown jewel of station promos has to be “We’re 4 New York”:

Now, if you noticed, this was three-and-a-half minutes long. And it was literally a music video. Blogger Matt Coneybeare, in 2015, described it as “33% cheese, 33% saxophone, and 33% retro NYC goodness.” The composers were Julie Gold, best known for Bette Midler’s Grammy-winning “From a Distance”; and Edd Kalehoff, who is a longtime TV composer and wrote the themes for Double Dare and The Price is Right. He’s even in the video, playing a guitar toward the end.

Singing are Curtis King Jr. and Andrea McArdle, who have had long careers. King is a well-known background singer and studio artist who has toured with a number of artists including David Bowie, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. It’s an impressive and eclectic body of work and in 2017, he released is own album, Changing Face, which according to his website, blends Afro-centric rhythms, jazz-inspired musicianship, and soulful storytelling into a sound shaped by a lifetime of songwriting.”

Andrea McArdle has had a long career on Broadway and is notable for originating the role of Annie in the 1977 musical of the same name. She’d appear in a number of shows, her most recent being a 2023 revival of 42nd Street, and has done her own concerts performing Broadway hits. I have actually seen her on Broadway twice. The first time was in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Starlight Express, which I went to on a field trip with a gifted and talented program in the summer of 1988. That musical, if you have never heard about it, was about trains and all of the actors were on roller skates. I’m not kidding. More importantly, however, I saw her as Fantine in Les Miserables on Broadway during my junior year of high school (1993-94). At the time, McArdle was married to Kalehoff and their daughter Alexis (who is a Broadway performer herself) sang an updated version in 2007.

Pyburn Films shot the promo, and that company’s creator, Randy Pyburn, was the creative director for NBC in New York. ON the company’s page are other high-profile clips for The View, The Discovery Channel, and various projects involving Michael Strahan. Needless to say, this was a professional and polished piece, well beyond what you might get from a small-market affiliate. Then again, WNBC is a station that broadcasts out of 30 Rock and has been the launching pad for a number of NBC News faces, such as Al Roker. The station also has had some of the more recognizable anchors over the years. Or maybe that’s just because I remember watching it a lot and have seen a number of Sue Simmons bloopers.

By the way, there is a great video of Simmons explaining this in a lecture in 2013 and I recommend watching it. The explanation starts about four minutes in and it’s funny as hell.

“We’re 4 New York” first aired during the 1992 Olympics. For me, it came seemingly out of nowhere. We happened to be watching the Olympics and it came on in its entirety. I remember my mom was obsessed with seeing it again so she could tape it for some reason. I think she wanted to show it for something at work, perhaps inspiration for her team or an internal marketing strategy? All I remember is that I did manage to catch it and tape it for her.

So the song and the video are a bit cheesy and a lot of it looks like it’s right out of a Sprite commercial from around the time, but the thing is damn effective and the timing was perfect for both the channel and the city. First, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics were a huge must-watch TV event and NBC’s ratings were huge (despite the massive failure that was the Triplecast), so people were bound to see it. Plus, I can imagine that a three-minute video during a commercial break might have given the TV audience some pause.

Then, you have New York itself. 1992 was during the last half of the David Dinkins administration and at a time when the city was coming out of an era of decline and desperation that started in the Sixties and bottomed out in the late Seventies. Dinkins took over the mayorship from Ed Kock, whose administration had started the city on its way to improvement but was saddled with a number of controversies. While Dinkins’ administration had a number of issues including the recession of the early 1990s, he was responsible for a falling crime rate (including the murder rate) as well as cleaning up Times Square (something Rudy Giuliani got too much credit for). This glossy, bright depiction of the city was perfect, as if Channel 4 was saying that people should come to New York, or that “New York is Back”. Why else would there be the lyrics “For the pride/For the joy/For the thrill of being #1”?

In all, it’s a showcase. WNBC had been around as a television station since 1941, and by 1992 the people on the newscasts were well-established and recognizable, which is why when you see the newscasters saying/singing “We’re for New York” toward the end in a manner similar to the “Let’s Go Mets” video, you’re not wondering who they are. For the record, you have Al Roker (weather) and Len Berman (sports), Chuck Scarborough, Sue Simmons, and someone I think is either Mary Civello or Dawn Frantangelo (the Live at Five team, I believe), Carol Jenkins and Palph Penza (who worked various WNBC newscasts), and … Jerry Seinfeld?

Yeah, someone definitely pulled strings to get Jerry, and that was kind of a big deal since this is around the time Seinfeld was about to become the biggest thing in sitcoms (in fact, NBC was airing “Seinfeld Olympic Moments” and would air the two-part trip to LA episode “The Trip” (which wrapped up the storyline where Kramer moved out at the end of the previous season) right after the Olymics. It’s also a weird cut because the video quality is completely different from everything else and I can’t tell if he’s being sincere.

I don’t see network promotional clips like this anymore. Local news anchors and reporters are still recognizable figures in a number of places. Here in Charlottesville, running into one is like spotting a local celebrity (in fact, I hung out with one or two on a couple of occasions), and in larger markets they actually get followings (the late Jim Vance who anchored Washington, D.C.’s NBC broadcasts had his image on the famous mural outside of Ben’s Chili Bowl). But like I said earlier, the promos are to the point and focused on what the news brings you instead of a touristy montage. And network promotions these days (if they exist at all) are clip montages that you might see before watching something on a streaming service. Not that anyone is pining for the return of local affiliate cheese, but there’s something to be said about the times when a station had its own identity and fostered a brighter sense of community.