the now explosion
In 1968, broadcaster Bob Whitney experimented with a new program that would play Top 40 singles with a continuous video feed. The result was The Now Explosion, a show a lot like the weekly Top 40 shows of Casey Kasem and Rick Dees. The show recorded in Atlanta and broadcast on WATL-TV. A young Ted Turner later bought the rights and broadcast it on his new station, WTCG-TV (which would, in 1979, become WTBS). Production was pretty crude, but kind of amazing for its time. After the jump, a peak at psychedelic-era MTV and how it was produced.
Programs were bicycled to stations on 2 inch videotape and played back for extended periods from one to six hours. WPIX-TV in New York played five hours of The Now Explosion surrounding telecasts of New York Yankees baseball games in 1970. Stations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Sacramento and Boston had also picked up The Now Explosion.
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The special effects were crude but state of the art for the times. Video shot with heavy, non portable studio camers on large rolling tripods. The recordings were on two inch magnetic tape. The cameras and tape machines cost hundreds of thousands dollars. The editing was simple cut or dissolve.
Common special effects included aiming the camera into a monitor. This was called “video feedback”. It created an “infinity” image of the image being fed to the monitor. The image, possibily a dancer, appears to have their image repeated behind them many times and get smaller and smaller as it repeated. If you moved the camera back and forth you could get “trails” on the end of the image.
Then there was the zoom in-out rapidly technique. Other common techniques were using a “mat” and blending images with an electronic video switcher with some basic special effects.
A few years ago, UG-Athens tracked down and restored archives of the show, allowing us to see what music television was like before MTV. . .
Also, Archives II and III.