Dance Party USA in 1986

In the spring of 1986 a Philadelphia dance show that had spent five years playing to one city got handed a national cable channel. For the first few episodes it did not even have its final name. By that summer it was running every weeknight at seven o'clock, right after the cartoons.

Dance Party USA premiered on the USA Network on April 12, 1986. It was a half-hour show in its first year, airing as a daily early-evening strip, and it was built directly on the Philadelphia show Dancin' On Air, which shared its studio, its set, and much of its cast through 1986 and 1987. Dave Raymond hosted into 1986, with Andy Gury taking over that year.

How a local show became a national one

Dance Party USA did not start from nothing. Its predecessor, Dancin' On Air, had been broadcasting from WPHL-TV Channel 17 in Philadelphia since October 12, 1981, created by Michael Nise and his father Frank and produced out of the family's offices and studios in Camden, New Jersey. In 1986 that show was picked up in syndication by KDOC-TV in Los Angeles, where it doubled the station's ratings in its first week. The then-fledgling USA Network took notice, hired the Nises, and Dance Party USA followed.

The launch was quick enough that the branding was still moving. For its first few episodes the show went out under the name Dancin' USA before settling into the title it kept for the next six years.

The result was a strange and specific arrangement that defines the 1986 season: for 1986 and 1987, Dancin' On Air and Dance Party USA used the same studio and the same set. Audiences watching both shows saw the same regulars, the same guest dancers, and the same visiting celebrities, sometimes on the same days. One production, in one building in Philadelphia, was feeding a local station and a national cable network at once. More on that in Dance Party USA vs. Dancin' On Air.

Where it actually sat on the schedule

The listings from the show's first summer are specific about what Dance Party USA was in 1986, and they are worth reading plainly, because they establish something the show would not keep.

In the TV Guide issues covering July 5 to 11 and the week of August 2, 1986, Dance Party USA appears on the USA Network as a half-hour program in the 7:00 slot, running weeknights and giving way to Radio 1990 at 7:30. On the prime-time grid it lands in USA's early-evening block, following the network's Cartoon Express animation strip. Nothing in those listings carries a longer running time, and the entries next to it that ran an hour say so.

That is the shape of the first year: thirty minutes, every weekday, in the slot where a cable channel put the thing it wanted teenagers to find after school and before prime time.

Who was on the floor

Dave Raymond, who had originated the Phillie Phanatic, hosted into 1986. Andy Gury took the job that year and held it into 1989. The Philadelphia tapings ran at WPHL-TV and WGBS with the production staff working out of Camden.

The regulars are the reason people still search for this year. Bobby Catalano, who had first been on the air in 1985 through Dancin' On Air, was already an established regular by 1986 and already working the persona he was known for. Jason Pascoe's run as a regular began in 1986 and continued through 1988. Kelly Ripa was on the floor across both shows in this stretch, years before the acting career that made her a household name.

Surviving tape from the year shows what the format actually consisted of: lip-sync features built around a single regular and a single hit record, USA Network commercial breaks wrapped around a half-hour of dancing, and the visiting acts that the Philadelphia operation could pull in on any given afternoon.

The honest bottom line

1986 was not the show's best year and nobody involved was pretending otherwise at the time. It was a half-hour, it was brand new to a cable network most of the country was still figuring out how to receive, and its identity was so entangled with Dancin' On Air that the two shows literally could not be told apart by set. What 1986 did was establish the thing: a daily national slot, a cast of regulars the audience learned by name, and a format cheap and repeatable enough to run five days a week. The explosion came the following year. This was the year that made it possible.

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