Television and Entertainment
The NBC telecast of the game, with play-by-play announcer Dick Enberg and color commentators Merlin Olsen and Bob Griese (who was not in the booth with Enberg and Olsen), garnered the third highest Nielsen rating of any Super Bowl to date, a 48.3 but it ended up being the first Super Bowl to garner over 90 million viewers the highest to date up to that point. While Dick Enberg, Merlin Olsen and Bob Griese called the game, Bob Costas and his NFL '85 castmates, Ahmad Rashad and Pete Axthelm anchored the pregame, halftime and postgame coverage.
To celebrate the 20th Super Bowl game, the Most Valuable Players of the previous Super Bowls were featured during the pregame festivities. After trumpeter Wynton Marsalis performed the national anthem, Bart Starr, Super Bowl MVP of I and II, tossed the coin.
The performance event group Up with People performed during the halftime show titled "Beat of the Future". Up with People dancers portrayed various scenes into the future. This was the last Super Bowl to feature Up with People as a half-time show, though they later performed in the Super Bowl XXV pre-game show.
The Last Precinct debuted on NBC after the game.
Super Bowl XX was simulcast in Canada on CTV and also broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.
Super Bowl XX is featured on NFL's Greatest Games under the title Super Bears.
Read more about this topic: Super Bowl XX
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 critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)