Television and Entertainment
The game was broadcast in the United States by NBC with play-by-play announcer Curt Gowdy and color commentators Al DeRogatis and Don Meredith. Charlie Jones served as the event's host, field reporter and would cover the trophy presentation (prior to the 1975 NFL season, NBC did not have a pregame show).
The Grambling State University Band performed during both the pregame festivities and the national anthem. During the national anthem, they were backed by a Mardi Gras choir. The halftime show was a tribute to American jazz composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington, also featuring the Grambling State University Band along with Ellington's son Mercer. Ellington had died the previous May.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show on CBS (which was set in Minneapolis) used this game as a plotline on the episode aired the night before the game. Lou Grant was teaching Ted Baxter how to bet on football games, and used Ted's money, as well as some of his own to bet on the hometown Vikings winning the Super Bowl. The Vikings won the Super Bowl in this episode but Ted's hopes were dashed when it was revealed that Lou actually bet all the money on the Steelers. At the end of the show, Mary Tyler Moore announced the following over the credits: "If the Pittsburgh Steelers win the actual Super Bowl tomorrow, we want to apologize to the Pittsburgh team and their fans for this purely fictional story. If on the other hand, they lose, remember, you heard it here first." And, as it turned out, her apology did go into effect.
Read more about this topic: Super Bowl IX
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)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)