Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Names of the Programs

"NFL Play by Play Report" -- The game-of-the-week program in 1965.

"NFL Game of the Week" -- From 1966 to ... well into the 1980s. I can't recall when the "Game of the Week" stopped being a staple of Saturday afternoon fall programming. Around 1987, perhaps? That was the year that the league started televising one regular-season game a week on either TNT or ESPN.

"NFL Action" -- The weekly program from spring 1967 until at least 1969. I've seen this title used in the introductory credits for '68 highlight films.

"This Week in the NFL" -- During the 1968 season, the show with highlights of the previous week's NFL games. Pat Summerall was the host of this 30-minute program. Not all of the previous week's games were featured.

"AFL Hilites" -- NFL Films handled the highlight films for the last two seasons of the AFL. Sabol's crews wore "AFL Films" windbreakers to shoot the games. Original AFL announcer Charlie Jones hosted this 30-minute weekly highlight film, and the end credits said the shows were a production of AFL Films Inc. This same copyright was used for the 1968 AFL Championship Game highlight film, and '69 season highlight films for AFL teams.

"This Week in Pro Football" -- The predecessor to "Inside the NFL" on HBO, and later Showtime. In 1969, with the NFL-AFL merger not yet complete, Charlie Jones (AFL) and Pat Summerall (NFL) were the co-hosts of this hourlong program, which had segments on each of the previous week's games, and often a featurette, such as Rudyard Kipling's "If" read by John Facenda. Beginning in 1970, the co-hosts were Summerall and Tom Brookshier.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Copyright issues

I absolutely love NFL Films. But sometimes they have issues with identifying what year a film was made.

"They Call it Pro Football" was once identified, on "This is the NFL" (I think that was its name then) in the early '90s, as having been released in 1966. But there's a montage in the beginning from Super Bowl I, which of course was played on Jan. 15, 1967. In a couple of interviews in recent years, Steve Sabol has been quoted as saying they made it in 1965.

They have recycled some program titles, so I can't say with certainty that they didn't make a film in 1965 titled "They Call It Pro Football." But the one with narration by John Facenda, music by Sam Spence and the ground-breaking editing of Yoshio Kishi couldn't have been made before 1967, since it has the Super Bowl I footage.

But that's such a miniscule nit to pick: As Sabol said in the "Lost Treasures of NFL Films" episode "NFL Films Style," when they brought together Spence and Facenda for the first time, they knew they were on to something. Plus, they'd made the boss really happy: Sabol quotes Pete Rozelle as saying, after the film premiered at the Huntington Hartford Theater, "That's not a highlight film. That's a movie."

Every Subculture Needs a Place to Meet

I've been a fan of NFL Films for more than 20 years. I remember the thrill I felt early in 1984, when ESPN (there was only one then, kids) aired "Lombardi," the 1968 biography of the coach that pre-empted "The Ed Sullivan Show" when it was shown on Sept. 15, 1968, the first day of the '68 NFL season. It was my first time seeing it.

Being a Packers fan stuck, at that moment, in the long stretch of mediocrity (at best) between Lombardi and Holmgren, I was agog: "Look at that great footage!" I think I knew the name of John Facenda at that point; I didn't know that he was stricken with the cancer that would take his life a few months later. (The Super Bowl XVIII highlight film was his last, Steve Sabol said in a tribute piece.) But I had a sneaking suspicion that it was between him and James Earl Jones as the Voice of God.

Were you like me? Did you scan the (printed) TV listings to see when ESPN would show "NFL's Greatest Moments"? Did you look forward to August because you knew it meant the team highlight films from the previous season would be shown daily? If so, you've come to the right place.