Good god the song in the documentary is SO BAD haha! But wow, I had NO clue that they actually cut out the metal for the HBO logo. Obviously it was a model city, but the lengths they had to go to back then to get what we saw was extreme.
Wonder what people 30 years from now will be saying about the intros we think look good? They'll probably be amazed we waited hours to render 30 minutes of video as they complete a video in under a second and store it on some who the hell knows what kinda medium that probably stores petabytes of data.
Late 80s, when I got Pixar's Typestry, a 3D text modeling application that ran on Windows 3, it took my $10,000 AT&T/Olivetti 386 16 MHz workstation (with a $500 add-on math co-processor and 2 MB of RAM) overnight to render a SINGLE frame. And I marveled at the time of the power and capability of what was in my hands.
I still have that introduction in my VHS collection, only in better shape than what was posted on YouTube, and I definitely remember watching that "behind the scenes" featurette when it was first broadcast. I was absolutely amazed, back then, at the time and expense they would go to just for a silly introduction. Having said that, I found the effect absolutely stunning at the time.