Television and Entertainment
The game was the first Super Bowl to be televised in the United States by the Fox network. Play-by-play announcer Pat Summerall and color commentator John Madden, both previously of CBS, called the game. James Brown hosted all the events with help from his fellow Fox NFL Sunday cast members Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Ronnie Lott.
This was the first of three Super Bowls to be called by Summerall and Madden while with Fox (Super Bowls XXXIII and XXXVI being the others).
Starting with this game, through Super Bowl XXXVII, the Super Bowl logo was painted at the 50-yard line, and the teams helmets were placed on the 30-yard lines. During the past Super Bowl games since the 1970 AFL-NFL Merger (Super Bowl VI), the NFL logo was painted on the 50-yard line, except for Super Bowls XXV and XXIX. The Super Bowl XXV logo was painted at midfield, and the NFL 75th Anniversary logo was painted at midfield in Super Bowl XXIX. The league started to put the NFL logo at midfield again for Super Bowl XXXVIII.
The telecast ended up being the highest-rated program in the history of the then ten-year-old Fox network, and it currently ties Super Bowl XLII for the highest-rated program in the entire history of the network. Afterwards, Fox televised The X-Files episode "Leonard Betts". Fox's broadcast was also the first Super Bowl to have a constant, live-updating graphic for the score, time and down & distance. The FoxBox was used also in Super Bowl XXXIII and the graphic positioned over live action has become the norm in virtually all sports broadcasts at the national and regional production levels.
With the Packers win, they became the third team to win Super Bowls on three different networks (I-broadcast on both CBS and NBC, II-CBS, and Fox). They also became the first team to win three Super Bowls with Fox as one of the networks to televise their win. They also became the first dark-colored team to win a Super Bowl indoors. The previous seven games played in domes were all won by the road team which wore white. The game was rematched on October 27, 1997, as a near-national telecast on ABC's Monday Night Football, the only time ABC aired a rematch of the previous season's Super Bowl.
This was the first Super Bowl played at the Superdome in which the home (and losing) team's point total was something other than 10. The Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos, 27-10 in Super Bowl XII, the Oakland Raiders defeated the Philadelphia Eagles, 27-10 in Super Bowl XV, the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots, 46-10 in Super Bowl XX and the San Francisco 49ers beat the Denver Broncos 55-10 in Super Bowl XXIV.
Read more about this topic: Super Bowl XXXI
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)