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.

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