Talking of the idents, I forgot the 'people tapping' breakbumpers - they used to freak me out when I was younger.
I don't really remember them at all - certainly not the white ones.
The early "celeb" ones I remember from C4 are of the logo being in glass boxes and celebs walking around.
Interesting though how looking back at things you often appreciate the much criticised things alot more. The celeb idents from the 4 circles era worked pretty well IMO.
Plus the fact that, excluding the original coloured blocks logo, most of the idents have dated well. IMO.
I agree, the circle concept, especially the promo endboards and promo still design with the 4 circles worked well, and wouldn't look out of place today.
What I admire with channel 4 is that even though their have been many different ident sets, not only is the logo the same (all be it a bit slimmer nowadays), but its only had 4 versions - coloured 3D, circled, squared and new 3D. But they seemed to experiment a lot within the branding, and in my opinion have always been years ahead of the competition.
Re: the Sci-fi Ident, I'm pretty sure I have the accompanying trail on tape somewhere with a similar large metallic/grey 4 travelling through space.
There are a
lot
of sequences there (mainly those in the 'tapping the screen' series) which are quite new to me; amongst them just a few which I do remember - albeit vaguely!
Though the Fourscore blocks and the current parallax blocks arguably seem the most popular eras ident-wise, I don't think Channel 4's presentation has ever been below par or looked dated / inappropriate. Even when it made that jump from the blocks to the circles, the thinking behind it was solid - it was a different representation of the same idea behind the original, whilst being equally flexible and highly contemporary.
This is also the subject of Week In Week Out this evening -- some reasonable recommendations being made on his site, along with a fact I was surprised at :
"It is, for instance, surprising that Channel 4 News rarely carries Welsh news stories or has a facility for filming in or from Wales."
Slightly related -- after the late local news last night, there was a promo for a C4 programme [Gordon Ramsey] during the ads on HTV -- never seen that before.