After a two week hiatus, the Videos of the Week return continuing a theme I started last month, Best Sports TV Themes. You can check them out here, here, here, here and here. There are a good many sports themes, but there are also some bad ones. Not every sports theme is a home run and today, I’m going to explore some of the bad ones. You may not agree, but you can certainly offer your own in the comments below.
Let’s start with the NFL and usually, the networks do a good job in creating music for the National Football League. However, there is one particular dud. This one belongs to CBS and it was used in the period between from 1990 to the end of the 1991 season. Compared to others used by CBS, it’s not as strong and in fact, it’s very weak. It sounds like an Eyewitness News theme.
NFL Network does a good job covering the league especially when it comes to the NFL Draft or creating events like the Super Bowl Selection or the NFL Schedule unveil. But when it comes to game coverage, it’s horrible. The production is amateurish. Sometimes the announcing can be bad. And this for Thursday and Saturday Night Football doesn’t even come close to the excellent themes used by Fox, ESPN and NBC. It’s downright awful.
This is ESPN’s Sunday Night Football theme from 2001 to 2004. Do you even know what ESPN was trying to achieve with the siren? Not my favorite theme.
When Fox ended its tenure with the Bowl Championship Series, it concluded a pretty forgettable reign over a sports property. While Fox Sports had some decent games, its choice of announcers to game production was practically low rent. Who could forget Thom Brennaman’s overgushing on Tim Tebow in 2009? Did you know Fox had a theme for the BCS? Yes they did and it was pretty bad.
When NBC had the Major League Baseball Game of the Week, it had two excellent announcing teams, Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola and Bob Costas and Tony Kubek. But for a couple of years, it had one of the worst synthesized openings of all time. Here’s an opening from the Opening Game of the season on NBC, Detroit at Chicago. Vin Scully does the open, but the music is just plain awful. One aside, Jack Morris the pitcher for the Tigers threw a no-hitter during this game.
Let’s go back to CBS and it’s current music for the PGA Tour. It was composed by Yanni and that alone is enough to make me hate it. It’s also terrible. Does this inspire you to play golf? Most certainly not.
This is CBS’ theme for U.S. Open Tennis and it’s also composed by Yanni. And it’s also horrible.
And completing a CBS trifecta here, this is a computer generated open for CBS Sports Saturday/Sunday used in 1984, replacing a more newsy theme that was utilized from 1981-83. Try to sit through this without hurling.
Over to the NHL on Versus, this is a very pedestrian theme. I see what Versus is trying to do, but it’s nothing special. The game production has improved, but this reminds me of the very boring Hockey Central pregame show.
When ESPN2 began, the whole idea was to make the network appeal to younger viewers so the graphics were edgier, hosts weren’t allowed to wear suits and blazers, ties were louder, but in the end, ESPN scrapped the idea. Here’s the open to the ESPN2’s “Fire on Ice” theme which was the open to the NHL. The music is dreadful. But note the late Tom Mees with Darren Pang at the end of the video. RIP, Tom.
I’m going to end this with a really lame theme and again, it’s from CBS Sports. This was the original NBA on CBS theme used back in the 1970’s. CBS got the NBA from ABC in 1973 and used this theme until 1976. The music and lyrics were just bad. Yes, that’s Brent Musburger on the play-by-play.
I can go on, but I’m going to get kidney stones if I continue to find bad themes. If you have any nominations, put them in the comments below or you can e-mail me or send one to me on Twitter. Should we get enough for another edition, I can certainly put together another edition. I’ll just need some Maalox before doing it. That concludes this edition of the Videos of the Week.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
