Memorable TV Opening Themes

[Quasar]

This show's kinda dumb, but I've always enjoyed the opening theme:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Thanks for creating this thread, Quasar. I'm a big lover of TV themes. I'd never heard that one before.

I wonder, sometimes, how much liking a theme has to do with the theme and how much of has to do with the repetition. I'll probably end up adding a bunch, but I'll try to keep it at five or six this time around.

Henri Mancini wrote two of my favorite TV themes:





The unique part of the URL for the Newhart theme is "g0StDroRiCs," which almost looks like something a person could make sense of. It makes me want to create a character named "Ghost Dr. O Ricks."

The Matlock theme is a fucking force of nature, and it primes you for a kind of awesome the show never matches. I used to flip to Fox just before the Matlock rerun just so I could hear the theme. I probably only stayed for the show about a quarter of the time, and sometimes I'd only watch the first half. Once the pieces started to fall into place, I'd often lose interest. Matlock could be a real douche when he was sewing things up in the courtroom. But that theme! I mean, listen to this motherfucker:



The composer is Dick DeBenedictis. He also did the themes for the Father Dowling Mysteries, Diagnosis: Murder, and Jake and the Fatman. I guess those are all decent, but Matlock's theme is in league of its own.

I don't know if Jubbers or I have ever written about Jubboiter and her relationship to TV themes on the boards. She completely ignores themes the first couple times she hears them. She doesn't watch TV. We're pretty happy about that. We resolved to stop watching shows when she was in the room once she started paying attention to them, since we don't want her to become a TV zombie. Some of her cousins are. It's not pretty.

Once Jubboiter becomes accustomed to hearing a theme, she will drop whatever she's doing, stare at the screen, and do a little sway. We were concerned about this at first, but she only ever checks out of reality for the theme. Once the theme is done, she goes back to her baby business.

There is one theme she used to go absolutely apeshit for: Doogie Howser, M.D. I watched the first two or three seasons over the course of a month or two when she was still pretty new to life--back when she was six or seven months old. Haven't watched the show since. Whenever she would hear the theme, she would smile, squeal, wave her arms, and start to rock. There's a video of it on Jubbers's Facebook, but I think you have to be friends with Jubbers to see it.

Anyway, in honor of Jubboiter, I present the Doogie Howser M.D. theme:



Unfortunately, the only pre-fourth season intro I could find was the above. Its uploader tells us with pride that it was uploaded from an Android phone.

My all-time favorite opening and closing themes are probably from Have Gun -- Will Travel. It's probably my favorite show, so maybe I like the themes more because of this. The opening theme was composed by legendary badass Bernard Herrmann. It's a pretty simple collection of horn blasts, and it's pretty characteristic of the Herrmann sound:



(Note: Richard Boone's audio clip changed from episode to episode. It was usually a preview of some bit of his dialog from the episode to follow.)

The closing theme is pretty awesome, too. It's a Johnny Western tune. Herrmann was uninvolved with it. I sing it to Jubboiter a good bit:



You may know the theme even if you've never watched the show. The kids in Stand by Me sing it while they are traveling. With a gun, even.

[Jubbers]

So you don't need to worry about Facebook. Not sure how long YouTube will allow the Doogie Howser audio, but here it is:



This was 10 months ago!

[Djack Zteelecock]

My moms used to watch 'Matlock' all the time, so I've seen dozens of episodes. Listening to the theme song felt strange: I'm not sure if it was the sense memory, or something else, or a combination. I thought maybe it reminded me of the 'It's a Jungle Out There' opening to 'Monk, but I dunno.

I really like the 'Dallas' opening them: it's like a train, unstoppable. I never watched the show, so the characters mean almost nothing to me (except I've heard of J.R. Ewing, of course), so I prefer the theme used with 'Star Wars' footage. I've also seen it with 'Star Trek: TNG' images, and I like that one, but 'Star Wars' is the best, IMO.



Some other themes I love are from my childhood cartoons:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I like the Fatal Farm version of the Dynasty theme:

[Mal Shot First]

Goits and Jubbers, I appreciate your valiant efforts to prevent your daughter from becoming a TV-zombie, but I fear it's bound to happen sooner or later. I loved watching TV when I was a kid, but I didn't reach true zombiedom until we got cable (when I was about ten years old). Entire afternoons just flew by. My sister and I used to have this old cassette recorder and we would make our own little fake programs. Another thing we used to do was to record TV show themes, so for a lot of the shows I enjoyed, I didn't even have to wait until they came on TV in order to hear the theme song. It was a bit of an obsession.

Here are a few of my favorites from my childhood.

Three's Company has to be on top of that list. It's light and uplifting, sort of like the show itself.




I also can't leave out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme. I think I've mentioned in a thread on Corona how I didn't actually understand most of the lyrics to the song when I was a kid, but all you really had to understand was "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (which is easy enough) so you can chant along with the theme. I told this to Goiter once: there's something so primal to this element of the song that it sticks with you right away and stirs some kind of excitement within you, as if you know instinctively that shit's about to go down. It reminds me a bit of how the Rocky theme can pump you up. Maybe it's just me, though.




Can we include The Real Ghostbusters intro, even though the theme was basically adapted from the movie theme? I saw the cartoon before I saw the movie, so for me it was always a TV-theme first. It's a great opening.




I never really followed Sledge Hammer! because it had a similar issue as Matlock, in my opinion. The opening theme leads you to expect way more than the show actually has to offer, or maybe it leads you to expect a different kind of show, but never delivers on the expectations it sets up. I also love how the accompanying footage is just unabashed gun-pr0n.




I'm not sure if other people feel the same way, but I always had a soft spot for the Roseanne theme song. It starts out almost subdued at the beginning of the series (maybe "subdued" isn't the right word - it certainly seems somehow quieter, perhaps because the arrangement is simpler) and gets progressively bolder with later seasons, culminating with a bit of an over-the-top addition of lyrics performed by John Popper in Season 9. It's kind of neat, though.

[Mal Shot First]

How could I forget the Game of Thrones intro! I like how it builds upon the basic elements introduced in the first few seconds: it starts by playing the primary motif with the solitary cello and the drum for percussive accompaniment, and it's then joined by a supporting violin (I think?) to reiterate the motif. This, in turn, gives way to another repetition of the motif by a group of strings, which then opens up into a new segment that builds up into a concluding repetition of the basic beat now played by percussion and string instruments in unison. (The little "epilogue" with the plucked string instrument at the end is a nice touch, too.) It's kind of simple if you think about it, but it's beautifully constructed.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I still plan to watch the show, so I'll skip the Game of Thrones theme for now.

You mention its simplicity. I can get behind a simple theme. The intro for Have Gun -- Will Travel is also pretty simple.

The Firefly theme gets points for its simplicity and understatement. Here it is:



I didn't like it at first. The show grew on me, though, and so did the theme. Same goes for Angel and its theme.

[Quasar]

The Dallas theme definitely belongs here. That Star Wars version is great! And I love Dynasty's theme. I had no idea all those people showed up in that show!!

Mal, I'm on the same page as you with recording, only I was compiling a cassette tape full of themes. I would stick the ghetto blaster next to the tv, turn up the volume, and hit record. Then I would tell everyone in the house to shut the hell up so there wouldn't be any extra noise showing up on my tape! Here's a couple of the first theme songs to make my tape:

[Quasar]

Goits, you're pretty safe watching the Game of Thrones theme. The entire theme just has the camera moving around a giant map with buildings rising up out of the ground.

Here's another one in a similar vein to the 2 I posted above.

[Quasar]

This is a show I added to my list when kah mentioned it before she flounced. The show was alright, but I kind of got addicted to the theme:

[neglet]

A new one I just adore:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Jubboiter and I are also fans of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine theme.

I think I've mentioned before how the nearest mall was forty-five minutes away and how I almost never got to go. I got to go thanks to some school function when I was twelve or thirteen. The mall had a RadioShack, which was pretty sweet. I spent all the money I had on a VCR AV-to-standard-mic-jack converter cable. (The real name for it wasn't quite as unwieldy.)

I was able to run the coaxial from the TV to the VCR, and I was able to run the converter cable from the VCR to my cassette recorder. This allowed me to record all sorts of audio onto cassette. I got theme songs, commercials, episodes of various shows, and a bunch of movies. The stuff I recorded from the TV was pretty crackly, since we got such shitty reception. (NBC and ABC were decent, CBS looked grainy but sounded good, and Fox and PBS both looked and sounded like shit.)

The stuff I transferred from VHS to cassette sounded great. I liked to listen to movies while I walked. Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Return of the Jedi were probably the two I listened to the most. I used a C120 tape for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That way, I was able to fit the whole thing on one tape. I used C90 tapes for Return of the Jedi. It was too long to fit on a C120, so I didn't bother. C120s were precious, thanks to how much info could be recorded on them. (The tape was also really thin, so they broke incredibly easily and were more prone to sound bleed.)

I could also switch from input to output and put audio from my cassette recorder onto VHS tapes. Mostly, I used it to move songs from cassette to video. If you had an EP/SLP tape, you could make it so that you had six hours of continuous music blasting from your television speakers. Sure, there was a lot of screen hum, but it was six hours of continuous music.

Sometimes my mother would let me borrow her VCR so I could set up two VCRs and record both the video from a VHS tape and the audio from a cassette tape onto another VHS tape. If I wanted, I could leave the left (or right) audio input in and have both the original VHS tape's audio and the cassette tape's audio record onto the new VHS tape. If had a tape in my cassette recorder and pressed record while I was recording from one VCR to the other, I could even transfer my voice in live time. I tried my hand at some MST3K-type stuff, but it didn't turn out so great. It was hard not to get mixed up. Also, sometimes the audio for one of the inputs would be too soft or too loud. Lots of trial and error. Lots of time wasted.

I also liked to dub songs I liked over workout videos. Typical workout video music blows.

[Quasar]

[Quasar]

Not all memorable opening themes are of the good variety:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

On the other hand, Land of the Lost's closing credit music is pretty decent (skip to 1:11):



It's not great, but it's good by comparison.

[Dalty]

Magnum PI and Knight Rider all the way!

I like the new Hawaii Dive-Oh theme, to modern things up a bit.

And Doogie Howser was freakin' awesome as a show as well as a theme.

[Dalty]

ST:TNG

Ace opening!

[Quasar]

[Quasar]

I'd be willing to bet that all He-Man's success was attributed to that theme song.

[Quasar]

I always felt the end credits song for Dungeons & Dragons had a sad, lonely quality to it that conveyed the kids plight better than their constant whining for home ever did.

[Mal Shot First]

I'd be willing to bet that all He-Man's success was attributed to that theme song.

I'm sure at least some of its success can be attributed to the bitchin' animation.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

YOU SONOFABITCH!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Also, I was considering posting both He-Man's theme and the D&D closing theme whenever I got around to doing a cartoon edition. I snoozed. I loozed.

I'm not really up for compiling a bunch tonight, but I will go ahead and add this one:



I've made Jubbers watch some Saturday Supercade. She didn't care for it. Anytime I want to annoy her (not that I ever want to annoy her), I have but to sing the first couple lines of the Saturday Supercade intro theme.

[Jubbers]

Or the one from Silver Spoons.