Stay Tuned For a Very Special Post

Do you remember when you were a kid and you were sitting in the den waiting for your 8:00 p.m. show to come on and all of a sudden the CBS Special Presentation music would start playing and you’d see the word SPECIAL rotating on the screen? For me, that was always a moment that made me fearful. If I were facing away from the TV I would whip my neck around and my eyes would lock onto that rotating C. It was something about those conga drums and tympani and the way the segment would just appear on the TV screen without much warning that would make me very anxious. Those drums always sounded so ominous! Whose idea was that anyway? Who decided that a few measures of heavy percussive music would be the signal that regularly scheduled programming was going to be interrupted? I guess they had to compose something that would get your attention, but did it have to scare the hell out of small children? Thank goodness that the musical segment was only a couple of seconds long, because I recall my heart stopping each time it came on and I didn’t breathe again until it was over. The good thing about the CBS Special Presentation segment is that even though it was scary to me, it was usually followed up by something that was enjoyable and calming. Not one second after you’d hear the last of the drum beats, you’d begin to hear the Vince Guaraldi Trio signaling the start of a Charlie Brown Special or maybe you would start to see the snow-covered landscapes that began many of those Rankin-Bass stop animation specials. In any case, I wanted to use that CBS Special Presentation music for my upcoming post.