THE NFL ON FOX

I was a curious kid, and before the myriad offerings that 500 cable channels of nothing to watch had to offer, there were a few TV shows that truly piqued my interest. I loved programming about the exceptional, the odd, the gifted and the bizarre. “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy, Ripley’s Believe it or Not with Jack Palance… Those were my jam. But I especially used to love a show called “That’s Incredible!”. John Davidson, Fran Tarkenton, and Cathy Lee Crosby.  They were the kings of my TV world when I was 10.

There was the man born with two faces, and the surgeons who helped remove the other face. There was the man who built a castle by himself from coral slabs weighing tons. The yogi who squeezed himself into a tiny 2’ x 2’ box. A hill where gravity pulls cars up. Man I loved that shit.

There was one episode where a guy jumped a motorcycle over a freight train. But the ramp was on the tracks, and if the rider didn’t hit it at just the right time he would have died. I later met this man, Johnny Airtime, at a shoot I was doing with some motocross riders in Utah. I ended up riding back to LA with him. He was totally stoked that 20 + years later someone remembered his TV appearance on That’s Incredible.

In its original time slot, “That’s Incredible!” was on Monday nights on ABC. This meant that it was up against NFL’s Monday Night Football, and if the game of the night was a west coast game or an east coast game that went into overtime, my favorite show would be preempted or not shown at all. Which meant that my 10 year old self often imagined a world in which the NLF didn’t exist at all.

CREDITS

Client - FOX
Agency - @Radiacal Media
Director - Rosy
Writer - Evan Mathis
Creative Director - Evan Mathis