The Huddle Launch Campaign
Easily the longest-lasting legacy of KFDF was its in-house live sports talk show. Marty Houston and John Wilhelm hosted a half-hour (later expanded to an hour when the show migrated to Fox 46) of viewer call-ins, sports headlines, and wall-to-wall color commentary. Marty once commented - on the air! - that The Huddle had the production values of a cable access show, and that was a big part of its charm. The Huddle was launched with a bizarre promo which spoofed the then-inescapable glut of Sega commercials, comparing “our sports” (footage from The Huddle) with “their sports” (a variety of sports games played on my trusty old Odyssey2 video game system). The Sega homage continued right through the final second of the promo, in which a strange-looking stuffed animal rises into the frame and yells “HUDDLE!” (a la the then-ubiquitous “SEGA!” tagline). The Huddle promos and the show open featured 3-D work rendered in Lightwave 4.0, and the end product was composited with the Video Toaster 4000.
