Videos of the Week: 2008 Olympics – Various Opens and Closes

Now that the Olympics are over, I can find some worldwide TV partners opens and closes. This includes the BBC and NBC. I did find some extensive CBC stuff from the Closing Ceremonies and also, the network’s bidding farewell to the Olympics, but unfortunately, the person who put them up won’t allow embedding, so until someone else puts them up, I’ll wait to publish them here.

But I can give you what I have found thus far.

Here’s the NBC Today show trying to be coy about the opening to the Olympics even as the Opening Ceremonies were about to get underway.

This NBC’s ID as “America’s Olympic Network” and then the intro to its Daytime coverage with Jim Lampley as host.

Just before the USA men’s basketball team was about to take on China early in the Games, NBC dusted off its old NBA theme bringing a tear to my eye.

I’m going off the beaten path here. I really don’t want to do this, but here is John Tesh explaining how he came up with the theme he calls “Roundball Rock”. You may have seen this performance during various PBS fundraising specials. This is from a concert in 1997. I’m about to throw up. I love the theme, but seeing John Tesh run around is a bit too much. He doesn’t run around in this clip, but during this concert, John is seen running all around the place like Yanni.

I’ll never put up another John Tesh video here. Anyway, here are the last words of Bob Costas’ closing comments and NBC’s closing credits with scenes of Communist China then a montage of moments from the Olympic Games.

Let’s move to the BBC and the open for its Olympics Breakfast program using the great Monkey intro, then going into a nice video montage using Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” just before Day 1 of the track & field competition. Adrian Chiles and Claire Balding are the co-hosts.

Someone put together a bunch of BBC opens. I really like watching the Monkey animation. And I love the “Previously at the Olympics” montages.

Here are the BBC’s closing credits with scenes of the Olympics from the UK perspective (there are some US athletes included) done to “Miracle” by Tom Baxter. This is one of the better closing credits I have ever seen and the song fits very well. Very nicely done.

After the closing credits, people all over the UK started looking for Tom’s music. This is the official video to “Miracle”.

There you have it. This concludes our Olympics videos until 2010 when we’ll preview the Vancouver Winter Games with videos from past Olympics and I can go back to Calgary in 1988, provided that YouTube is still online, of course. Thanks for watching.