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"Weather Channel jumps back in time for early morning ‘retro’ forecasts" - Newscast Studio

S

speer360

www.newscaststudio.com

Weather Channel jumps back in time for early morning ‘retro’ forecasts

The Weather Channel is blasting back to its past with an early morning feature called ... Read More
www.newscaststudio.com www.newscaststudio.com

"The Weather Channel is blasting back to its past with an early morning feature called “Retro 8s Live.”

Running as an hourlong block at 4 a.m. eastern, “Retro” recreates the channel’s iconic 1990s-era look (and sound) of banded orange and blue gradients paired with smooth jazz background music."
 
Seems vaguely like "The Weather Network" in Canada, which, during unstaffed hours at nights and on weekends, runs a loop of national and regional weather maps and conditions.
 
Is Dan Chandler still alive? The first WX4000 narrator. Today's kids will never get to hear "Your local 36-hour forecast from the National Weather Service" every :08 of the hour. With the Internet and Googling the WX forecast, those days are over :-(
 
Mr. Chandler died this spring.
 
Sad. I think he had worked as an announcer for TWC since the days of the old 3000 system in the mid-1980s. Along with Dave Schwartz and John Hope (both RIP), Dan made TWC great in the early days of cable. RIP Dan!
 
This is bound to excite all of the Weather Channel/WeatherStar/IntelliStar nerds out there. I recorded this morning's broadcast and watched it this evening. It was everything I had hoped for. It was a fantastic homage to the WeatherStar 4000 with the graphics, narration, and of course, that fantastic soundtrack. There's obviously some (small) demand for this given all of the fan channels related to classic Weather Channel graphics and the Local on the 8s.

This is probably somewhat unlikely, but I'd like for Retro on the 8s to be longer than just an hour and start earlier. If it were to start, say, at 1 AM or 2 AM eastern, I could just put it on and fall asleep to it at night. I know the internet and simulators exist, but it would be much more fun (and easier) to put it on my TV via cable with local weather information scrolling at the bottom. Having retro-themed Local on the 8s segments that air during Retro on the 8s would be incredible, but likely not possible with the current IntelliStar 2 xD units.

Here's hoping this experiment lasts for a while, or maybe even expands to get earlier! At the very least, it might generate some interesting press for the Weather Channel.
 
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