Have you tried explaining ancient tv and entertainment phenomena to your children - and then find it hitting you just how weird that thing was?
Show The Lawrence Welk Show to a 12-year-old.
Show a photo of Huey Lewis & The News to your music loving 18-year-old and tell them they were the #1 band in the world.
Try explaining that you used to have to get off the couch to change the channel or just deal with three networks for everything.
Three channels?!
Well, I've got a oddball curio from pre 2000 television for you to mull over: The George Michael Sports Machine
What It Was
The George Michael Sports Machine was peak 1980s/early-90s sports television, where highlights met giant blinking buttons and industrial sound effects.
Here are some of the silliest and most loveable things about it:
The "Sports Machine" - A giant, blinking, whirring prop "computer" that George would press buttons on as if he were launching a rocket just to show ... a hockey goal.
Nothing ever looked less like a "machine" that could run sports highlights.
The Button-Pushing Ritual - George would stare intensely into the camera, announce a sport, then slam a button with the enthusiasm of a kid setting off a bottle rocket, "LET'S FIRE UP ... THE SPORTS MACHINE!" - (which always just triggered a standard tape segment).
The Sound Effects - Each button press came with sci-fi beeps, clunks, futuristic whooshes and laser sounds.
It was basically Star Wars for highlight dunks and French Open tennis finals.
Graphics Trying Their Best - It wouldn't be a TGMSM show without a theme of neon, chrome, and digital text that belonged on a Vic Commodore 64 computer. Segments swooped in with 80’s screen wipes and title cards, the kind that insisted you take "Highlights From the Indy 500" as seriously as a nuclear launch countdown.
But it wasn't just the RadioShack set dressing that made it magical.
It was George Michael's dead serious delivery.
He would run through his copy of a slam-dunk contest as if he was narrating the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach.
Every episode built up to the same moment: George Michael stepping confidently toward a blinking wall of colored buttons - the "machine" - ready to summon the best highlights from across the world.
How TV Sports Was For Grandpa Back In The Day
Back then, there was ESPN but it wasn’t at all what it would become.
You were way more likely to see rodeo riding on ESPN than a real highlight.
There was no internet, to the point that you waited for boxscores in the next day's paper.
Fantasy Football results would get to you in the mail on Friday after your commissioner compiled them by hand based on final Tuesday box scores.
Highlights didn't exist.
All we had were about 90 seconds of local news highlights.
Then if you're lucky, your football team would make the Monday Night Football halftime highlights with Howard Cosell.
That was it.
For all its camp, The George Michael Sports Machine had one major superpower: it brought national highlights into living rooms at a time when you simply couldn't get them otherwise.
Pre-internet, fans outside of big markets were stuck with whatever their local station decided was important. If you loved hockey in North Carolina, or IndyCar in Oregon, or gymnastics in Kansas City, you weren’t seeing those highlights anywhere else. George Michael made sure you did.
Today, we just tap a YouTube icon. It isn't the same.
The Cherry On The Sundae Of Your Team Winning On Sunday
In the access-less wasteland of sports fandom circa 1986, you couldn't see highlights on demand.
Even in your own market with your favorite team.
Let's say you were a loyal San Diego Charger fan in 1985, for example, and you're loving your aging 8-8 team leading the league in scoring but couldn't stop a paper bag on defense.
You really savored every win.
After a treasured Sunday afternoon victory, you couldn't watch the game again.
So, you were desperate for highlights.
You'd get maybe 3 plays on local news around 6:30pm and then that's it.
But not so fast - the George Michael Sports Machine would give you the last couple of minutes of coverage that you would get that night and it was wonderful.
Late Sunday was a great ritual.
Grab a snack, fire up the Sports Machine and watch the last sports of the weekend.
It turned "catching up" into an event.
Evolution Of The Machine
The machine itself changed in the production over the years.
Giant tape reels were always part of it.
And more space-y or laser-y sound effects in the 1980's.
I can't find it on YouTube or archived images but in some years I swear there was one giant red button that George would push to kick off some highlight of Julio Franco turning a tough double-play.
If you really want to dive deep - either for old dude nostalgia or young guy astonishment - you can pay attention to the production value and the machine itself on YouTube.
But here's a few pictures of the machine over the years. Personally, I prefer the early era
1986
1988
1994
1997
Ripe For Parody
There is so much silly about it, that's why it stuck in my mind and I'm writing about it today.
For starters, his name being George Michael was endless comedy.
Wham had already been on the charts a few years by program's start.
So that joke was always there for you.
But the giant fake machine was the star, and easy to make fun of.
Saturday Night Live had a funny "George Will's Sports Machine" which was really more about Will's pomposity about baseball.
The giant computer in the Mr. Show sketch Car Wash Change Thief Action Squad is fantastic (not enough in this clip).
But the recurring Gerry Todd sketches with Rick Moranis on SCTV nailed this era of love and fetishing emerging video technology.
We Started Taking It For Granted, The Dwindling Era
Shockingly, it didn’t end until 2007.
That seems about 10 years longer than I would have thought.
My personal beef with TGMSM was that George was based out of Washington, D.C.
He was still a local sports personality there.
So there were times like in the 1990 I’m trying to see if the Mets can match wins with the Pirates in their pennant race, I'd turn on the machine and George would go all local and spend the first 12 minutes on Redskins training camp and if Gary Hogeboom was going to make the roster as the primary backup.
Time moved on.
By the mid-2000s, it looked like a retro-futuristic museum exhibit still convincing us it could "access" clips on demand.
By the end of its run in 2007, the real technology behind sports broadcasting had skyrocketed way beyond George’s gadgetry. People could stream highlights online. Sports highlight culture not only was on ESPN 24/7 but it exploded on MULTIPLE cable networks. The Sports Machine looked like a time capsule from a future gone by.
Legacy
Was The George Michael Sports Machine silly? Absolutely. It was oversized, overdramatic, and gloriously theatrical in ways sports TV would never dare try now.
But its silliness was an invitation - to get excited about sports, to believe in the spectacle, to feel connected to games happening everywhere.
The machine may have been made of blinking plastic, but the need for getting sports highlights in the 80's and early 90's was very real.
