Art by George Butler.
This episode was written and produced by Fran Board.
In the 1980s, every movie that aired on HBO began with a truly epic theme song—a sweeping orchestral piece that triggers instant nostalgia for anyone who grew up with it. Then in the 90s, HBO introduced a 5-second audio logo for their original content. Today, we associate that sound with some of the most groundbreaking TV shows of all time. In this episode, we reveal the story behind the creation of these two iconic sounds. Featuring composer Ferdinand Jay Smith and former HBO Executive Vice President Bruce Richmond.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Original music by Wesley Slover
You Should Know by PRIZM
Live For The Moment by Georgia West & the Underground
Wandering Lights by David Celeste
Tanz Mein Liebe by Trabant 33
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View Transcript ▶︎
[music in]
You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
When you think of HBO, you probably imagine it as a streaming service. People will say that they have Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney Plus, yadda yadda yadda. But HBO the television station, has been around way longer than any of those. It’s even older than the internet itself.
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s, we didn’t have HBO. It was something that you had to pay extra for, and in my mind, it seemed like this fancy channel that only rich people could afford. But once in a while, on family vacations, I did get to watch HBO in the motel rooms we stayed in. Back then, it was pretty common to see HBO Included on the signs outside of the motels. It was the kind of thing that made us poor kids say “Oooh! I wanna stay there!”
To me, HBO was this magic portal to all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t see anywhere else. For a kid, there was also an element of danger to it, since HBO played R rated movies. Matter of fact, my parents once caught me watching Terminator 2 in our motel room, and I got in big trouble.
[sfx clip: Arnold: Hasta la vista, baby. [shot + shatter + music]
For me, a big part of what made HBO feel so special was this outrageously epic song that would play before every movie.
[sfx: HBO Feature Presentation]
To this day, I still get chills when I hear that. And I know millions of other people do too, including a lot of our listeners.
Jake L: That theme song still gives me goosebumps. Reminds me of that time. I love that theme song. I think it’s one of the best.
Daniella: It just brings me back to being 8 years old in front of the TV everytime I hear it, even now. And it’s probably one of those sounds that most brings me back to my childhood.
[sfx clip: Feature Presentation out]
[music in]
HBO was originally conceived by Charles Dolan. Dolan was a pioneer in the world of cable television. In the early 60s, he started a company called Sterling Manhattan Cable, which was the first company to wire buildings for cable access.
His next big idea was a channel where people could watch sporting events and movies from the comfort of their couches, with no commercial breaks. Instead of making money from advertising, people would pay a monthly fee to add the channel to their cable package.
HBO’s original name was Sterling Cable Network. But since the whole point was to watch sports and movies at home, they eventually landed on the name Home Box Office, or, HBO.
[sfx clip: “Welcome to Home Box Office subscription television, bringing you great movies, sports events and special programs unedited and commercial free. It's good to have you with us.”]
When HBO first debuted in the early 70s, it was only in Pennsylvania. The first thing they ever aired was a National Hockey League game.
[sfx clip: Rangers Game ‘72]
[music out]
In the beginning, HBO had about three hundred subscribers, and it aired for just a few hours a day. Remember, this was back when television channels used to shut down at night.
[sfx clip: Signing off]
Here’s a Sign Off message that HBO used in the 70s. What you see on screen is a bunch of adorable cartoon people and their pets going to bed for the night.
[sfx clip: Signing off music out]
Even back then, HBO did things differently than everyone else. It was the first standalone television channel that you could pay for. It also aired the first ever pay-per-view event, which was a three-hour white knuckle thrill ride of the Pennsylvania Polka Festival.
[music in: Tanz Mein Liebe]
HBO was one of the earliest networks to deliver their channel via satellite. Their first satellite broadcast couldn’t have been any better. It was the legendary boxing match between Joe Frazier and Mohammed Ali.
[sfx clip: Thrilla in Manilla: Big round for Ali! (crowd chanting “Ali! Ali! Ali!”)]
And they were one of the first channels that played full length movies on a regular basis.
[SFX clip: Promo: Sunday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Starring Jack Nicholson in his Oscar winning performance. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Premiering Sunday on HBO.]
By the early 80s, HBO had grown to over ten million subscribers. By that point, they were airing across the country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But as far as their sonic branding strategy, it was kind of all over the place.
[sfx: First logo]
Early on, the music that played before movies sounded kind of like intermission at a drive-through theater.
(I do kind of love it though.)
They had another song that you could imagine John Travolta dancing to at a disco.
[sfx: Second logo]
A few years later, they tried out this smooth song.
[sfx: Ninth logo]
It kept going on like this until eventually HBO decided it was time to make the most epic movie introduction in history.
Ferdinand: Michael Fuchs was the chairman of HBO at the time and a terrific guy. He said, "I want you guys to create the most expensive movie opening ever made."
That's Ferdinand J. Smith. He was hired to compose this game changing theme.
Ferdinand: Now, when someone says that to you, "Let's see, hmmm. You want the most expensive, huh?” “Okay, then that's what we'll do."
For Ferdinand, this kind of job was right up his alley. A few years earlier, he wrote this movie intro for CBS.
[sfx clip: CBS Saturday Night at the Movies]
He also wrote one for ABC.
[sfx clip: ABC “Star Tunnel” movie intro (1980-1983)]
At one point, Ferdinand even wrote a theme song for his own family reunion. Later, he sold that song to a supermarket chain to use on their commercials.
[sfx clip: Wegmans We are a Family]
When Ferdinand composes, he doesn’t sit at a piano like most people. Instead, he hears the different parts in his head, and literally sings every part into a little hand-held recorder.
[music in]
Ferdinand: I had some schooling in music, but I am a head writer.
Ferdinand: I can hear the music that I'm creating in my head fully orchestrated. So it's just a gift, I guess.
After he’s made his voice recordings, he’ll take them to an arranger, and work with them to create a demo version.
Ferdinand: I'm working with the arranger in the studio. We put down the basic track. And then I layer on horns and I usually save strings for later.
Once all of the parts have been worked out, the arranger turns it into sheet music for the orchestra.
Ferdinand: Sometimes it drives people crazy. But the ones I've worked with for a long time understand how I work.
For the HBO intro, Ferdinand was paired up with Anthony Lover, who was in charge of the visuals. Here’s Anthony talking about it, in a promo from the early 80s.
[sfx clip: Anthony: We had to come up with a concept that would be unique. That would look unlike anything else on cable or on network television.]
Anthony’s idea started with a couple sitting down to watch TV...
[sfx clip: Anthony: and the camera slowly pulls back, and goes out his window, and magically we start this tour and flight as we swoop down through a city.]
[music out]
Today, this concept might sound pretty tame. But at the time, it might’ve been the most ambitious opening sequence ever made. Without CGI, they had to create a model city by hand. Building it took six people over three months. The model city was over thirty feet long, and included almost a hundred unique buildings. This is from that same HBO promo.
[sfx clip: Narrator: First they were shaped and moulded, they were painted to look weather-beaten, and finally detailed with incredible accuracy. “Pay a little closer attention to detail…”]
No detail was too small. They made street signs, hundreds of trees and plants, and even working street lights.
[sfx clip: Narrator: There’s a working light bulb in every room in every building, and headlights in the cars and busses.]
After the camera flies through the city, it looks up into the night sky, where the HBO logo appears in a shower of stars. To create this, the team made a physical 3D version of the logo, made of chrome-plated brass. [sfx clip: Narrator: In the finished effect, they appear to be a giant HBO space station floating towards you.]
While Anthony’s team worked on the visuals, Ferdinand wrote music inspired by the mock-ups. According to him, the melody just... popped into his head, like it always did.
[sfx: night sounds in]
Ferdinand says that a lot of his songs were written in the middle of the night.
He’d just wake up and put it all down on tape. [sfx: Groggy person singing melody, yawn]
Once he came up with the melody, he had a piano player record it to a cassette tape.
[music clip: Feature Presentation piano version]
But when he played the tape for the executives, they weren’t sure about it.
Ferdinand: When I played the piano demo for Michael Fuchs, he said to me, "Ferdinand, it sounds like a Jewish wedding march." And if you think about it, I tend to write in minor... “Ba-da-la, da-la, ba-la-da-da…”.
Ferdinand: And I said, "Michael, just trust me and wait for the orchestra”.
To bring this track to life, they hired a 65-piece orchestra. But in the middle of the recording session, Ferdinand suddenly realized that the animation was longer than what he had written.
Ferdinand: I was sitting there with an orchestra and I said, " this is… this is eight seconds longer than it was supposed to be."
To fill that extra time, he had to make up those eight seconds on the spot.
Ferdinand: Have you ever noticed how the end goes... [sfx: sings + Feature Presentation snippet] You noticed that?
Ferdinand: We have it slow down, if you will, so that we bought the extra eight seconds.
But since these eight seconds weren’t on the sheet music, Ferdinand fell back on what he knew best: which was singing these new parts directly to the orchestra.
Ferdinand: So I'm sitting there with the guy who's directing the orchestra, singing them those parts.
Ferdinand: The orchestra are looking at me like I'm out of my mind. That's a true story. That's why it ends that way.
Ultimately, everything fell into place. This theme perfectly captured the excitement of sitting down for an epic movie night. Here’s the final version, which is about a minute long… and I want you to listen carefully, because this theme will come back later in a big way.
[music clip: HBO Feature Presentation music]
[music in]
Before long, that piece was being heard millions of times a week. But HBO didn’t stop there. In the nineties, they made another piece of sonic branding that became just as famous, if not more so. And today, we associate that sound with some of the most groundbreaking television shows of all time. [sfx: sonic angel]
That’s coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[sfx clip: HBO Feature Presentation]
When HBO first launched in the early 70s, they were broadcasting for just a few hours a night, to about three hundred people in Pennsylvania. Over the next decade, the station exploded in popularity. By the mid 80s, they had millions of subscribers all across the US. And by then, every movie they played started with this classic theme song.
[music out]
[music in]
By the nineties, HBO had started to change their focus. On top of the movies and sporting events, they started making original shows.
One of the first was The Larry Sanders Show. It was a comedy about a self-centered talk show host, played by Garry Shandling.
[sfx clip” The Larry Sanders Show] What’s it like? / What’s what like? / What’s it like being nobody? / Oh, boy I can see this is gonna be a fun conversation. / No, I mean what’s it like not being a celebrity? / Oh!...]
The Larry Sanders Show was kind of a meta commentary on show business. It could be dark, and self aware, and it was a big influence on later comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm and 30 Rock.
When the show first started, it opened up with the words Home Box Office Presents. The animation didn’t have any sound or music. It was kind of bizarre. HBO quickly realized that they could spice it up.
[music out]
Bruce: There had been a rich history of HBO kind of doing these things, but not for its original programming.
That’s Bruce Richmond, who’s the former head of production and executive vice president at HBO.
[music in]
At first, these HBO title cards were all different.
Bruce: That credit wasn't consistent. They'd use whatever typeface, right?
They needed something that would tie all of these shows together.
Bruce: So I think it was a need-based thing for us, which was like, it makes sense to have something that unifies all the programming that we're getting.
And it needed to live up to HBO’s reputation of doing things differently.
Bruce: HBO had always been a place that was about groundbreaking on every level.
Bruce: It always had a history of doing that, of being a place that was there to create its own ethos and DNA.
They even started using the slogan, It’s not TV, it’s HBO. And they wanted the audio logo to reflect this idea.
Bruce: There was this kind of idea of, “It's not TV, it's HBO,” and how do you flip this thing, this concept. And it very literally was, “What if there's like an old version TV, but when they turn it on, it's this…” [sfx: dun dun! (horns)] You know?
Bruce: So, the conversation... early on came into, let's focus on the turning on of a television set.
[sfx: TV on + music out]
Once again, the audio was inspired by the visuals.
Bruce: We did the video first and then we designed the sound off of the video. So the sound design came up as a second piece, and as a very important part of it, but it was the second part of the process.
[music in]
The visuals start with a TV turning on [sfx: tv on]. At first, it’s just black and white static [sfx: tv static], but then the HBO logo comes into focus. The graphics were generated using a computer workstation called the Quantel Paintbox. This device was mostly used by news stations, and when it came out in 1981, it cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generating the graphics for that 5 second logo took three whole days.
Bruce: Three days in the Paintbox to create the animation, an extraordinary long time.
Once the graphics were made, Bruce and his team had to make a sonic logo to go along with it.
Bruce: There were literally three of us in the room when we created it.
It was Bruce, his business partner, and a sound designer. The recording session was at the sound designer’s house, which was up in the hills of Los Angeles.
Bruce: I'm kind of driving up into what seems like a very wooded area in the middle of Los Angeles and we go to his house, and it's a very kind of old A frame. And he's just got a little audio setup. You know, he’s a musician and he’s also a sound designer. So, there we sat for the next eight hours, kind of following picture.
[music out]
The first part of the sound was easy enough.
Bruce: Obviously, we had the static, we had the thing turning on.
[sfx clip: HBO Originals static sound]
Bruce: The things that we started to play around with were, “What do we want it to do after?”
They wanted some kind of transition—like you were moving from normal television into something special.
Bruce: We had in the room this idea that we wanted it to resonate to something. So I think that's when we started to think about that resonating multi-timbral kind of drone that it then fades into.
[sfx clip: HBO Originals choral sound]
That drone includes a synthesized choral sound. To me, it sounds like angelic voices, but Bruce says that wasn’t the intent.
Bruce: You're saying angelic, but we may have not been thinking angelic.
Bruce: If you listen to that, there's more “low end resonant” in there than there is “high end angelic.”
An octave below the vocal sound, there’s also a low synth tone. It’s a little hard to notice at first, but we’ve boosted those frequencies so it’s more obvious.
[sfx clip: HBO Originals choral sound]
The audio session took all night. During that time, they tried lots of variations.
[music in]
Bruce: We had certainly gone down many rabbit holes by the time we got to 12:30 am.
Bruce: We had many different static things. We had many different resonant things. We tried a bunch of different things.
In the end, they decided this one was the winner.
[sfx clip: HBO Originals sound]
Bruce: The sound was so conditioning, in a positive way. It was pleasing. It felt like you were being brought into something, you were transitioning into something.
Bruce: To me, it was like the perfect bite.
At the last minute, they added one final detail.
Bruce: I remember the moment vividly.
You see, there are actually two versions of that sound: One that plays before a show, where the TV turns on...
[sfx clip: HBO Originals sound]
…And another one that plays after it’s over, where the TV turns off.
[sfx clip: HBO Originals end version]
[sfx: quick fade in CRT buzz under Bruce]
Bruce: If you turned off an old time CRT [sfx: turn CRT off], and you know you're on an old person's podcast, when I say the term cathode ray tube, CRT, that thing used to, like, shrink down to a little dot and then it disappears. And so we did that very consciously in the video and there was a little teeny click at the end.
[sfx: Click]
Bruce: That little pop at the end, right? As that little piece turns off, that's where we knew we finally had a sentence, as it were, right? We had a thought. We had a beginning and a middle and an end.
Bruce: That was the last thing we put in and we knew it. Everybody just looked at each other and we were like, "It's done. I mean, perfect." So, there was a moment of, "Don't touch it, we'll mess it up."
[music out]
Finally, they had something to glue all of their original programming together. Of course, at the time, no one realized that they had just made one of the most iconic audio logos in history.
Bruce: No! Of course not! Anybody who tells you they knew it was a hit before they made it is lying.
[music in]
By the early 2000s, HBO was producing hit after hit. They had shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City, award-winnning miniseries like Band of Brothers, and stand up comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock. And to top it all off, they had not one but two massively famous sounds.
But in the twenty years that followed, the world of television completely changed. And HBO had to figure out how to keep up with the times. In the age of streaming, would people even want to hear a bombastic 90 second HBO fanfare before they watched a movie? And in the digital era, does the sound of analog TV static even make sense? Maybe it was time to throw out all of these sounds, and come up with something brand new.
That’s coming up, next time.
[music out]
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. For a little sticky sonic candy, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram, and Youtube.
This episode was written and produced by Fran Board, and Casey Emmerling. With help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Joel Boyter, with original music by Wesley Slover.
Thanks to our guests, Ferdinand J. Smith and Bruce Richmond. These days, Ferdinand is the Executive Creative Director of an ad agency, and Bruce is an executive producer over at Amazon.
To keep up with what’s new at Twenty Thousand Hertz, you can follow us on Facebook, on Twitter, or on our subreddit, R slash 20K. Even better, you can subscribe to our newsletter, by going to the web address 20K dot org slash newsletter.
And if you’d like to see the Feature Presentation animation in all of its glory, there’s a link in the show description.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
