This episode was written and produced by Fran Board.

In part 2 of our series on HBO, we explore the tough questions that the company faced in the digital era: Are people still willing to sit through a 90-second theme song before they watch a movie? Does the sound of analog TV static even make sense to younger viewers? Could the company change with the times without losing the nostalgia they had built around their key sounds? Featuring composer Ferdinand Jay Smith, former HBO Executive Vice President Bruce Richmond, HBO and HBO Max Head of Brand Marketing Jason Mulderig, and Made Music Studio Creative Director Mickey Alexander.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original Music by Wesley Slover
The Puzzle Solver by Amotz Plessner & Friends Vol 2
Breathing Underwater by Smooth Frequencies
The Light from Within by Howard Harper-Barnes

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View Transcript ▶︎

[sfx: 1983 Feature Presentation in]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

In our last episode, we talked about how HBO created not one but two iconic pieces of sonic branding. First, there was this epic theme that would play before a movie came on. It was written in 1983, and as far as I’m concerned, it still slaps.

[sfx clip: Feature Presentation theme main melody begins]

Ferdinand: When HBO plays that theme, as everybody says to me, "It sounds like something important is about to happen.”

Ferdinand Jay Smith composed this theme song.

Ferdinand: And I think that's a fair estimate. That's exactly what it is. There's something important from HBO coming on.

[sfx clip: Feature Presentation out]

Ten years later, HBO made an audio logo for their original shows. Essentially, it was TV static transforming into an angelic choir. Some people call this sound the static angel.

[sfx: HBO Static Angel]

[music in]

For years, these two sounds defined HBO. But as the internet took over the world, HBO eventually found that they had a big problem. Sitting down for a movie was no longer a special event that happened once or twice a month. It was something that people could now do anytime they wanted. And they probably didn’t want to hear a bombastic 90-second intro every time they did. As for the static angel? Well, that was built around the static of an old CRT television... something younger viewers might not connect with, or even recognize.

HBO knew they had to change with the times. But on the other hand, they didn’t want to lose the nostalgia that people had for these sounds. Take the Feature Presentation song. A lot of our listeners have great memories of it.

[music out]

Tom: Growing up we would get really excited every time the HBO introduction would come on, because we sort of had this ritual where every time it came on, at the very end where they have that big trumpet fanfare [sfx: trumpet part of feature presentation], and sort of lasers that were going in some sort of circle, we would just spin around and around until we got so dizzy that we fell on the floor. We would do it every single time it came on. I still get a little bit dizzy every time I hear that

In the 2000s, HBO started hosting outdoor movie nights in Washington DC. It was called Screen on the Green. And before every movie, they played the theme song in its entirety.

[sfx clip: Screen On The Green redesign]

Nate: You have several thousand people all on the lawn, all clapping together to the beat of the theme song, getting ready for the movie.

It even had its own dance.

Joe: A whole bunch of people in the crowd would stand up and put their arms up in the air and wave their arms back and forth. They had made up a whole dance to go along with the HBO theme.

Jason: People would get up and start dancing for this whole minute. I mean, just uncontrollable joy, just loving it, loving it. And it was just so great to see that emotional connection and the mood that it puts you in.

[sfx clip: Screen on the Green out]

[music in]

Jason: My name is Jason Mulderig. I oversee brand marketing for HBO Max and HBO.

In 2010, the network launched HBO Go, which was their first entry into the world of streaming. By that point though, the Feature Presentation theme wasn’t being used all that much. For starters, it’s over a minute long.

Jason: It's really long. I mean, it doesn't exist really in that form today because no one wants to watch something for a minute before you watch a movie. Like you want to watch it now, very much on-demand.

But Jason and his team knew how important this music was to the brand. And they wanted to bring back that magic and excitement. However, they had to do it in a way that made sense in the age of streaming.

Jason: We decided we want to get back to using more of these emotional triggers, enhance the emotional connection, and how do we take all the great memories of HBO and package it up for a contemporary audience, for our audience today?

Jason: How do we take this thing that existed in the past, that we know has power, and how do we update it and make it sound a little bit more contemporary?

[music out]

To answer these questions, Jason reached out to a sonic branding agency.

Mickey: We got approached in late 2016 to refresh this for sort of a new era of HBO.

That’s Mickey Alexander, from Made Music Studio.

Mickey: We jumped at the opportunity. Why wouldn't we want to work on this iconic piece that's been around for almost four decades now?

[music in]

The first thing they knew they wanted to do was update the musical style.

Mickey: The original is very “of the time.” It's very discowy. You've got this pop 70s, 80s orchestra on it, and we wanted to take that and make it relevant again.

But even if they changed the style, they didn’t want to mess with Ferdinand’s original melody.

Mickey: This theme and this melody it's been around so long because it's so memorable and iconic on its own.

Mickey: So, it's really important to keep that intact as we refresh it.

They had to figure out how to balance the old with the new.

Mickey: It's lot of pressure to build something that you know millions of people, each month, are going to listen to and experience, and the big challenge, really, was making sure that we are acknowledging the right pieces of the original composition and bringing it into a brand new platform and era of HBO.

[music out]

Mickey and his team wanted this music to evoke the feeling of sitting down for an awesome movie. So, they started experimenting with different styles inspired by movie soundtracks.

Mickey: We came up with about half a dozen demos that referenced different genres of film, and so, we had things that were a little more mysterious [sfx], a little more dramatic [sfx], a little more optimistic [sfx], some things that are maybe percussion driven [sfx], some things that are more of a traditional orchestra [sfx]…

Eventually, they landed an epic blockbuster sound.

Mickey: It was pretty clear from the beginning that we were going to be exploring a sort of hybrid “orchestra meets electronic” modern take on what a movie score is. And so, we came in with a bunch of reference material from out in the world, big composers like Henry Jackman...

[music clip: Henry Jackman - First Class]

Mickey:...or Joseph Trapanese...

[music clip: Joseph Trapanese - Fearful Odds]

Mickey: ...and films that use this sort of “hybrid orchestral electronic” approach.

When it came time to record, each section of the orchestra was recorded separately.

Mickey: The ensemble we came up with was meant to mimic, to an extent, what a traditional film scoring session would look like. So, in our session, we had little over 20 strings...

[sfx: Other strings stem]

Mickey:...about a dozen brass…

[sfx: Brass stem]

Mickey:...and we had this very special low-frequency session.

[sfx: Woodwinds stem]

Mickey: And what we did was we called in these crazy, super low, woodwinds that you really only find in specialty pieces, things like Contrabassoon and Contrabass clarinet, and in a lot of cases, these instruments are bigger than the people who are playing them. And so, we had these super low-end instruments, in a separate session, so we had control over it in the mix.

Next, they layered in some synthesizers and electronic sounds.

[sfx: Synth stem]

Mickey: So there's this very cool sort of dichotomy in the sound where we're taking older analog sources and a live studio orchestra, and we're blending it with modern, electronic, synthetic elements.

Once they put all of those pieces together, this was the final result.

[music clip: HBO Feature Presentation 2017]

Mickey: So, this piece starts out, it's very soft and gentle, there's a piano that references the first part of this HBO melody.

Mickey: And throughout, we sort of build a little bit at a time, we introduce more orchestral elements, more synthetic electronic elements.

Mickey: We have this big climax at the end. We teased the melody throughout, and then you don't get the full HBO melody until the very end.

Jason: I love the triumph of the horns at the end. It's just like such a big, big sound.

[music clip: Highlight final melodic phrase, then theme song out]

Jason: I love it. That's my favorite part that gets me every time, and I've probably listened to it 100,000 times.

The rest of the network felt the same way that Jason did.   Jason: We just fell in love with it. We fell in love with the sound. It felt like a mix of yesterday and today in a way that made us all really have the same emotional experience, but also position the brand and reach the audience in a way that we felt like was right for us.

Mickey: I still listen to that piece now five years later and get goosebumps as I listen to it.

Mickey: And the highest compliment, [music clip: Feature Presentation theme main melody, verby]I think, we can be given for this, is that it reminds people of that original incredible version.

[music in]

In addition to updating the song, HBO also wanted to redo the classic visuals that went with it. In the original, a couple sits down to watch TV in their living room. Then, the camera zooms out and flies through a city, before looking up to an HBO logo in the stars.

Jason: It sort of goes up and into the sky into this HBO sort of silver, metallic, almost satellite, right? It actually, sort of is a little bit of a wink to the delivery mechanism of the HBO satellites beaming the signal down to the nation. [sfx: satellite sound]

But, that’s not exactly how things work nowadays. While plenty of people still get HBO via satellite, millions of other people stream it from an app. And remember, this whole revamp was about reconnecting with their audience on an emotional level.

So in the new version, the camera flies through a city, going in and out of peoples’ homes as they sit down to watch TV. Eventually, it zooms out to reveal that this entire world exists inside of a giant HBO logo.

Jason: The current one sort of stays on the ground and ends in this reveal where really the city, really the people, really the audience is what makes up HBO, right? So there was a little bit of a nod just from a marketing standpoint. It's like, “Thank you to the fans,” right? Because really, you're also what makes this successful.

[music out]

The new theme song, and the animation that goes with it, is a little shorter than the original version. But by today’s standards, it’s still pretty long. In the age of streaming, it’s unlikely that people will sit through something longer than a few seconds. So the challenge was to take this track, and distill it down into bite-sized segments.

[music clip: Short version 1]

Mickey: We did three very short Feature Presentation clips. And these were about 10 seconds each.

[music clip: Short version 2]

All of these versions kept the core melody intact.

[music clip: Short version 3]

But in some cases, even ten seconds can be too long. So eventually, Mickey and his team made some that were even shorter.

Mickey: With the launch of HBO Max, we cut it down to what’s essentially a five second studio card.

[music clip: 5 second studio card]

HBO started sprinkling these sounds all across their network.

Jason: It still exists in various forms on the network. We've just changed the length. We've changed the instrumentation. So in some instances, we use it in three, five, 10-second little beats on the network.

On HBO, you’ll hear that melody before a movie starts, but you’ll also hear it underneath the animations that tell you things like what’s coming up next, what’s playing tonight, previously on, and coming soon.

Jason: So it's sort of the signal on the network like, “Hey, [music clip: short version 1] here's what's Next On.” Or, “Here's what's Tonight On,” or, [music clip: short version 2] “And now the HBO original series…” and you can kind of just hear some of the music in the background [music clip: 2017 Light Bumper] very delicately there.

Jason: So we still use it. It is still very much part of the identity of the network.

[music in]

By breaking the theme into these tiny pieces, HBO took this long, nostalgic track that people used to hear maybe once a week, and made it something they’d hear multiple times a day. But they did it in a way where you wouldn’t get sick of it.

Mickey: They've done a really great job at being subtle and creating this memory trigger with it across the network, across their properties. And so, this melody really defines HBO as a brand.

When people hear a three note melody under, say, an Up Next promo, [music clip: 2017 Light Bumper] they might not even realize where that music came from. But slowly, subconsciously, they start to build associations with that melody... associations that get triggered every single time they hear it. And that’s what great sonic branding is all about.

Mickey: When we're working on branding or thematic music, the first thing to consider is, “Will people remember it?” And we're really creating memory triggers for the audience.

The Feature Presentation theme had not only survived the transition to the digital age, it was thriving in a whole new way. But what about the static angel? [sfx: Static Angel]

Did it even make sense to modern viewers? I mean, when was the last time you saw actual black and white TV static? After more than twenty years, maybe it was finally time to update this sound for the digital world.

That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

In 2017, HBO commissioned a new version of their iconic Feature Presentation theme song. But this revamp did more than just update the sound for a modern audience. It distilled the core melody into something that could tie the entire network together. In other words, HBO took this single piece of music, and expanded it into an entire sonic brand.

Jason: That music I think, provides a rich tapestry for us to be able to pull little pieces from, that just sort of pull those little emotional strings along the way.

But HBO still had another sound to think about. It was the so-called static angel that played before their original shows.

[music clip: HBO Static Angel]

That sound was originally designed to transport people from run of the mill television into something truly special. The problem was that both the sound and the animation were based on analog TV static, which is something we almost never see nowadays. So over the years, the idea of changing that sound came up on more than one occasion.

[music in]

Bruce: When we moved to high def, there was a need to make a new asset, because no one had made a high def logo yet.

Bruce Richmond led the team that created the static angel.

Bruce: So it was an opportunity for us to revisit, “Do we need a new logo?”

Bruce and his team started testing out all kinds of new versions.

Bruce: That was like three months of boards and meetings. I mean, it went everywhere. Every idea. They were all really good branding ideas. There was nothing ever that was bad. You know, nobody came in with, "Hey, let's put a chicken on the HBO." [sfx: Chicken HBO]

But no matter what they tried, no one could figure out how to recreate the magic of the original sound.

Bruce: We did the same thing we did last time. But this time, something very funny happened. We went through the development process and we kept going and going and going and going, and we couldn't land on something.

Eventually, they threw in the towel. They decided that the static angel was perfect, just the way it was.

[music out]

Bruce: We had to examine why we couldn't get away from that logo and it was very simple.

Jason: At the end of the day, we always come back to, “We just can't top this. We can't beat it.”

[music in]

Jason: The sound hasn't changed.

Jason: It’s remained untouched.

As the head of brand marketing for HBO, Jason Mulderig has spent a lot of time thinking about what this sound means to people.

Jason: It's become this incredible ritual for HBO programming through the years.

Jason: It's really about the ritual of sitting down and watching something, and having this powerful emotional trigger that sets you in this emotional space of anticipation, and waiting for what's going to come next.

Bruce: I don't think we could ever divorce ourselves from that sound which had been so conditioning for all of us. Even when I hear it now, it conditions me.

Jason: It's Pavlovian in a way. It recalls memories.

Bruce: People understand on a Pavlovian level, that that's the moment right before they're going to get what they're waiting for.

[music out]

Just like the Feature Presentation theme song, many of our listeners have powerful associations with the static angel sound.

Andrew: When I was in college, a bunch of buddies and I all lived in a house. I think there were seven of us at the time and we used to watch Entourage on HBO weekly. And that static sound leading into the theme song from Entourage was the signal for us to get hyped.

[sfx: Logo into Entourage theme]

Jason: For me, the HBO static intro just reminds me of the Sopranos.

[music clip: The Sopranos theme]

Jason: Back at the time when the Sopranos was being broadcast here in the UK, there was no such thing as binge-watching. So you did have to wait for a whole week for an episode of a show you were watching. With the Sopranos there was a real sense of anticipation.

[music clip: Sopranos theme back up then out]

Michelle: So every time the HBO audio logo plays on TV, my partner and I always sing the three tuba notes that follow for the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. Even if we’re watching another show on HBO that’s completely different. When the HBO logo kicks in for it – “csssh ahhh” [sfx: static angel]– we’ll start singing “bum-bum-bum de-de-deee…” [Laughs].

[sfx: Logo into Curb Your Enthusiasm theme]

Seth: There’s only one thing that I hear when I hear that “csssh waaah” [sfx: static angel underneath]. It’s “dun dun, de de dun dun” – Game of Thrones!

[music clip: Game of Thrones theme]

Luis: Everytime I heard that static, you know, my brain subconsciously prepared itself to escape for an hour or so it just holds a special place in my heart. Every time I hear it now it just tells me that we’re about to embark on an adventure. We’re about to be a part of a great story.

[music in]

Jason: We've done a lot of consumer research and we see the emotional connection that it creates to the content.

At one point, Jason and his team were testing some new sounds and animations to use in place of the static angel. The focus group didn’t seem that impressed. But then, the static sound came on.

[SFX: Static Angel, just static, stylized]

Jason: All of a sudden the nostalgia, and the positivity, and the recall of all the warmth they had for the brand came out, and the focus group did 180 degrees. And it was at that point, we're like, “We can't change this. We just can't change it. It's too powerful. It means too much. The best thing we can do, the smartest thing we can do, is to not change it.”

Even as HBO has spread around the world, this sound has stayed the same in every single country.

Jason: It has become such a distinct thing that I think translates quite well to any language. It's an audio trigger and I think that works in any language, in any region, because it is associated with the content.

In the digital world, a logo built around TV static might seem out of place. But it turns out, that doesn’t really matter. This sound has taken on a meaning of its own.

Jason: It means so much more than whatever it originated as. It signals so much more. So it's really sort of hallowed ground.

[music out]

HBO still uses the static angel almost everywhere, with one exception. When they launched HBO Max, they started releasing what they call Max Originals, which are shows and movies that are only on the streaming side. For this content, HBO designed a new sonic logo. They tried hundreds of versions, from multiple sound designers. In the end, they chose one that was heavily inspired by the static angel.

[sfx: HBO Max audio logo]

Jason: Max Originals emerge almost from the static a little bit, and sort of push out and give a similar choral hum, a choral rise before the program starts.

[music in]

Just like the updated Feature Presentation song, the HBO Max logo is rooted in the sound that came before it. After all these years, that classic theme and that iconic logo are still the foundation of HBO’s sonic brand. And it’s not hard to see why.

On their own, these are both great pieces of sonic branding. They’re catchy, they’re memorable, and they’re just satisfying to listen to. But the nostalgia that people have for these sounds is just as important as how they were designed. And nostalgia isn’t something you can manufacture, and it’s not something you can buy.

Too often, companies get so focused on keeping up with the latest marketing trends, that they don’t let their logos and jingles develop a history. But if you’ve been hearing something for twenty or thirty years, it’s going to bring back unconscious feelings every time you hear it.

Jason: As we've thought about building more of a sonic identity into our marketing, you almost have to separate yourself from it and we ask ourselves, “How does this sound make you feel?” It's not going to blow you away to start. If there's a little bit of warmth in the sound or a little bit of hope in the sound, there's a rise in it, that might be enough. Then it's our job to create the right associations with it and you'll fill up the meaning and the recall that that sound creates over and over again.

Bruce: At the end of the day, we're not doing brain surgery. We're not frontline workers. It's not the stuff that in today's day and age, means survival. But it is the stuff that brings so many people happiness.

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To get some extra sonic inspiration, follow Defacto sound on Instagram.

This episode was written and produced by Fran Board, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Joel Boyter, with original music by Wesley Slover.

Thanks to our guests, Jason Mulderig, Bruce Richmond, Ferdinand J. Smith, and Mickey Alexander. And a special thanks to all of our listeners who sent in their memories of these HBO sounds. That’s Andrew, Daniella, David, Hawk, Jake, Jason, Joe, Luis, Michelle, Nate, Randall, Seth, Tom, and Vincent.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]