Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This is a story of network promotion going south in a big way. At Promax ’98 in beautiful Toronto, UPN’s top brass promised all of us that the fall 1998 season would be rich with heartwarming, positive, exciting, accessible-to-middle-America shows for the whole family. (This was about a year before Shasta McNasty and WWF Smackdown! premiered.) The new network slogan, we were told repeatedly, would be: “You’ll find yourself on UPN.” We all went home from Promax and started cranking out promos that said, for example, “You’ll find yourself on UPN 32.” UPN played us a “You’ll find yourself on UPN” jingle recorded – at great expense – by New Zealand dance group OMC (who scored on the charts with “How Bizarre”), and so we assumed we were in for the long haul with finding ourselves. Hey, it didn’t matter that this made no sense – the network was going to be using it, and we had to present a unified promotional message. And then the network didn’t use it after all. And they never told the affiliates they were abandoning it.
Over Christmas 1998, we ran an on-air contest featuring a cute little elf with a high-pitched voice (actually my voice sped up on a reel-to-reel), and the object of the contest was to find your elf on UPN 32. I would randomly insert the four-second Elf ID into prime time on the log, and viewers were supposed to write down when they saw the elf, and what show he appeared in. Good news: the contest was quite a hit, there was a lot of engagement. Bad news: everyone assumed it was for kids, and kids really don't have much of a use for a gift certificate from True Value Hardware in Neenah.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes of from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
This is a story of network promotion going south in a big way. At Promax ’98 in beautiful Toronto, UPN’s top brass promised all of us that the fall 1998 season would be rich with heartwarming, positive, exciting, accessible-to-middle-America shows for the whole family. (This was about a year before Shasta McNasty and WWF Smackdown! premiered.) The new network slogan, we were told repeatedly, would be: “You’ll find yourself on UPN.” We all went home from Promax and started cranking out promos that said, for example, “You’ll find yourself on UPN 32.” UPN played us a “You’ll find yourself on UPN” jingle recorded – at great expense – by New Zealand dance group OMC (who scored on the charts with “How Bizarre”), and so we assumed we were in for the long haul with finding ourselves. Hey, it didn’t matter that this made no sense – the network was going to be using it, and we had to present a unified promotional message. And then the network didn’t use it after all. And they never told the affiliates they were abandoning it.
Over Christmas 1998, we ran an on-air contest featuring a cute little elf with a high-pitched voice (actually my voice sped up on a reel-to-reel), and the object of the contest was to find your elf on UPN 32. I would randomly insert the four-second Elf ID into prime time on the log, and viewers were supposed to write down when they saw the elf, and what show he appeared in. Good news: the contest was quite a hit, there was a lot of engagement. Bad news: everyone assumed it was for kids, and kids really don't have much of a use for a gift certificate from True Value Hardware in Neenah.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes of from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
