CBS Special ident from the ’70s
Anyone who was a kid in the ’70s or ’80s probably still experiences a pins & needles reaction when watching the above six scant seconds of gloriousness… this is the ident CBS played before their special presentations, i.e., the holiday specials. I am a huge fan of old holiday specials (especially Rankin/Bass), and I’ve amassed a pretty impressive collection of them on tape and DVD. The one thing that’s always missing, though, is the CBS Special Presentation intro… Hanford and I have dreams of building the Rankin/Bass-o-Matic, a custom video player that will hold all our holiday specials in digitized form, and will automatically play the CBS Special intro before each one. (Hanford worked on the original design of ReplayTV, so he’s terrifically handy for that sort of thing.)
Hanford just learned something that perhaps further explains my primal reaction to viewing this clip: the music used for it was composed by Morton Stevens, and comes from music he created for Hawaii Five-O. Of course! Why has it taken me this long to recognize that it was no ordinary call to the television — it was thundering drums pounding out an island rhythm. Or, at least the Hollywood version of an island rhythm.
The above clip is sadly not of the best quality; here’s a link to a higher-quality MP3 of the music. Also, Hawaii Five-O’s first season came out on DVD a short bit ago.
- CBS Special Presentation Ident – 1973 [YouTube]
- The Hawaii Five-O Home Page
- CBS Special Presentation theme [MP3] [The Hawaii Five-O Home Page
- Hawaii Five-0 – The Complete First Season (1968) [Amazon.com]
Critiki News 
WOW! what a terrific sendback. this made my day!
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So glad to hear it! Doesn’t watching it make you feel like the next hour is going to be really, really good?
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Love the visual clip, but is that the same sound that I remenber. I thought it was like chines or the effect for shooting satrs
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Someone turned me on to this a couple of weeks ago. Every once in a while I go back to my You Tube favorites and just play it over a few times. My wife who is a little younger then I am keeps asking what the hell I’m doing :).
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teakey, they might have had a different version of this ident for use in later years. What years were you a kid?
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yeah, you asked if anyone was a kid in the 70s or 80s. I was 80s and I see under the srceen that the caption is CBS Special ident from the ’70s. I think that there must be two versions. I loved that logo though. We didn’t have many channels and so this was a must to watch.
But I got all geeked out over the He-Man intro sound clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqjTKzp6Pvo
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totally radical!
i had completely forgotten about this!
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teakey: Love the visual clip, but is that the same sound that I remenber. I thought it was like chines or the effect for shooting satrs
Just guessing, but by any chance are you thinking of the old Hanna-Barbera Productions logo?
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