Television and Entertainment
The game was broadcast in the United States by NBC with Dick Enberg handling the play-by-play duties and color commentator Merlin Olsen in the broadcast booth. This would be Olsen's final Super Bowl broadcast, as he was demoted the following season to make room for retiring 49ers head coach Bill Walsh. Bob Costas along with Gayle Gardner hosted the pregame, halftime, and postgame coverage with analysts Paul Maguire and then-Miami Dolphins head coach Don Shula, pregame roving reporter Jim Gray (who was also working as a researcher for NBC Sports at the time) and Marv Albert, who interviewed Boomer Esiason after the game. Meanwhile during NBC's pregame coverage, Ahmad Rashād and John Candy hosted the Diet Pepsi Talent Challenge at the Miami Seaquarium. Also, Frank Deford delivered a special segment profiling recently deceased Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney.
This was also the first NFL game that NBC covered with their new "Quantel Cypher" graphics system, which was introduced during their coverage of the 1988 Seoul Olympics (they had used Chyron for their graphics prior to Super Bowl XXIII). NBC also introduced their "cursive font" logo during this broadcast. Before, it was just the 1986 peacock logo with "NBC SPORTS" in their generic corporate font.
With the win, the 49ers became the first team to win Super Bowls televised on three different networks (CBS-XVI, ABC-XIX, and NBC). Since then, the Washington Redskins (in 1992), the Green Bay Packers (in 1997), the Pittsburgh Steelers (in 2006) and the New York Giants (in 2008) have accomplished this same feat.
The game aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, and simulcast on CTV in Canada and Televisa's Canal de las Estrellas in Mexico. For viewers watching the game on AFN TV Europe (Armed Forces Network), AFN and NBC broke for a commercial just before the Montana-Taylor touchdown play. AFN continued their announcements and did not get back to the game until after the touchdown. AFN viewers saw the winning touchdown in replay.
The pregame festivities honored the Miami and South Florida areas, along with a tribute to NASA.
Singer Billy Joel later sang the national anthem. He also sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XLI which coincidentally was held at the same venue. The coin toss ceremony featured former Miami Dolphins players Nick Buoniconti, Bob Griese, and Larry Little.
This was the last outdoor Super Bowl to start earlier than 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, as it started just after 5 p.m.
The halftime show was titled "Be Bop Bamboozled in 3-D" and featured Elvis Presto and hundreds of South Florida-area dancers and performers. Ironically, not one actual Elvis Presley song was performed. Several scenes included computer generated 3-D images. Prior to the game, Coca-Cola distributed 3-D glasses at retailers for viewers to use. At the onset of the halftime show, primary sponsor Diet Coke aired the first commercial in 3-D (Coca-Cola had originally planned to use the 3-D Diet Coke commercial as part of the 1987-1988, aired in 3-D season finale of Moonlighting, but withdrew plans due to the 1988 Writers Guild of America Strike).
This game also marked the debut of the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter. The first winner of the annual survey was an ad from American Express starring Saturday Night Live stars Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, who went to the game with different credit cards - Carvey with AmEx rival Visa, Lovitz with American Express.
The movie Brotherhood of the Rose aired after the game.
Read more about this topic: Super Bowl XXIII
Famous quotes containing the words television and and/or television:
“His [O.J. Simpson’s] supporters lined the freeway to cheer him on Friday and commentators talked about his tragedy. Did those people see the photographs of the crime scene and the great blackening pools of blood seeping into the sidewalk? Did battered women watch all this on television and realize more vividly than ever before that their lives were cheap and their pain inconsequential?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)