| GMA Network News theme: "Raw Power" composed by Craig Palmer, featuring the Network Music Ensemble (July 7, 1997 - July 30, 1999) In 1997, the newscast was given a new set, new theme music, and a sleeker opening ident and graphics package. In the opening ident, Kaimo gave a sneak peek of the night's headlines with clips from the specific news items, after which, Mike Enriquez (and later, GMA continuity announcer Al Torres) provided the voice-over, "From the award-winning GMA News and Public Affairs team, this is GMA Network News..." to introduce the newscast and its anchorpersons. Rachel del Mar became the program's new weather girl, who would always end the segment (then retitled "GMA Weather Center") with her signature close, "This is Rachel del Mar, your all-weather friend." which became "Ito po si Rachel del Mar, ang iyong all-weather friend." when the newscast switched to Filipino to end the weather forecast. However, Kaimo and Hontiveros eventually left the newscast as well. The former would move to ABS-CBN (to host The Correspondents and the Studio 23 newscast News Central), while the latter ran for party-list representative in Congress. Morales became sole anchor of the newscast while it prepared for a reformat, while the opening voice-over was eventually dropped from the opening ident. In 1998, Saksi anchor Enriquez joined Morales as co-anchor. It became the first Filipino newscast to do stand-up news delivery (inspired by US TV network newscasts). It also made a ... |
