Remember NBC News Overnight? They used to close out the show, as I recall, with a short video, I assume done by their staff. I had this one on tape for a long time, but it disappeared long since.
Watch it full-screen; the quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. I suppose it’s manipulative; I don’t care.
All that and Linda Ellerbee too.
The intention of the final piece in the show each night was to try to put the viewer to bed gently. I mean, after delivering the news of what humans had done to each other on any given day, we felt it was the least we could do. Because NBC News Overnight had a budget roughly the equivalent of a kid’s allowance, we asked the cameramen and video editors (whose abilities were rarely acknowledged, and never on the air) at NBC News and its affiliated stations if they wanted to strut their creative stuff on our show. We couldn’t pay them, but we could give them credit. On the air.
They didn’t disappoint us, ever. Many would send “end” pieces (cut to music) that had been put together from the out-takes of the news story they’d shot or edited for Nightly News that day. The one you featured aired on the final show, and was put together from many of those “end” pieces that had aired over the 17 months Overnight existed.
Is it manipulative? Well, it certainly manipulated me back to 1981-82, and so many good memories.
Linda Ellerbee