I was searching around on YouTube for 80s TV commercials, hoping to get some retro inspiration, and I came across the old HBO feature presentation intro. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, I remember many Saturday evenings curling up on the couch to watch a movie on HBO and they always started with that powerful intro. I always thought they were so cool, and it made you a little more excited about the movie you were about to watch, even if it was a total pile of crap like “Weekend at Bernies.”

Here’s the cool intro, just how I remember it:

It’s stunning watching this and trying to comprehend how people did that kind of stuff without computers back then. I never thought about what kind of work must have gone into it at the time, but I can certainly appreciate it now. Below is a 10 minute documentary from the 80s on how they made the intro, and it’s really surprising to see the clever approaches they took to these projects without any computers at all:

And below is the modern, computer-animated version of the HBO intro. It’s more difficult to be impressed by an intro like this nowadays. We are so overwhelmed with having computer-generated effects in absolutely everything, that this stuff just doesn’t stand out the way that old intro did.