So you're staring at the stars one night....when suddenly....
WHOA! Don't see THAT every day! Such a bizarre ray of light could only mean you're about to come into contact with an alien spacecraft!!
....oh. It's just a giant "HBO." What a letdown.
On the other hand, you could be up for one of your favorite movies, commercial free. Unless the aliens want to force you to watch a Sex and the City marathon, which is worse than an anal probe. As the "HBO" gets closer, it flips around and you travel to its side, and then to the "O," which opens up to reveal thousands of comets in all the colors of the rainbow.
If you had HBO at
any point in the 1980's, then you remember this video well. This
"feature presentation" identification played before
anything HBO ran, even before some specials that weren't movies
at all.
My contact with HBO is limited to the 80's, by the way...except
for the one instance in 1997 when I was at someone's house and
they got the channel. You know what I saw there? The floating
"HBO" again! Were they really using it for that
long? Are they still using it NOW? I'm clueless....somebody with
HBO, write in and tell me.
It's good enough to be used for twenty years, though. When I saw the Starship HBO in 1997 I thought "wow, those are impressive computer graphics for when that was made." I was wrong. There is no CGI in this video....that "HBO" was real. They actually went through the trouble of smelting a giant metal HBO, and then rigging it with wires to make it float through a starry background! This had to cost a million bucks! ....Oh right, we were footing the bill.
DOWNLOAD "HBO FEATURE PRESENTATION"
There was also a rarely-seen extended version of the video that added about a minute to it, and took you through a birds-eye view of a stop-motion city before finally panning up to the stars, where the intro started normally. I've got that too.....