Memorable TV Opening Themes

[Mal Shot First]

Sounds like the Flash theme was inspired by Danny Elfman's theme for the 1989 Batman.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

That was his go-to sound for hero music in the late eighties and early nineties. You hear it in the opening he did for Batman: The Animated Series and the "After the Kid" track from Dick Tracy. (The "Main Titles" track is a welcome change for Elfman. It has more of a forties WB romance vibe.) You even hear strains of it a decade later in his Spider-Man theme.

He also had a go-to sound for non-hero music at the time. You can hear that sound in his themes for The Simpsons, Tales from the Crypt, Beetlejuice, and Family Dog.

[Quasar]

Sounds like the Flash theme was inspired by Danny Elfman's theme for the 1989 Batman.

Danny Elfman often inspires himself to repeat himself.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Might as well dig this back up:

[Mango]

The Trickster's theme in "The Flash" is very similar to the Joker's theme in Batman:tas. Also he has a crazy blonde girl break him out of jail with the hopes of becoming his sidekick.

I just recently re-watched that show, it was awesome and holds up pretty well. You can tell that after the success of "Batman" they really dumped money into the thing.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

They really did work overtime to make the Trickster as much like Joker as possible. It was clear they combed through the Rogues Gallery to find the most Joker-like villain. The guy they chose to play the Trickster would even go on to play the Joker. A lot.

They consulted Howard Chaykin on the series. That was kind of cool, I guess, even though--as far as I know, anyway--he never worked on a solo Flash title. You'd think they would have consulted Mike Baron or Mark Waid.

[Quasar]

I thought the Flash was a really cool character, but I mostly knew him from the Justice League comics. I picked up a few Flash solo comics as back issues, and they were all pretty terrible. For as much as everyone carries on about his "Roges Gallery", all his villains pretty much suck, with the exception of the Reverse Flash. But even with him, his real name is Professor Zoom. To give a little perspective to the villains thing, supposedly one of the Flash's greastest nemesis is a guy called Abra Cadabra.

[Dalty]

I have never rated Supes rogues gallery much.

Bats wins, hands down.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I've often wondered if fans would think as highly of Bats's villains if there hadn't been so much saturation. How much of it is that they are good, and how much of it is that Bats has more media exposure and adaptations than pretty much everybody? Do he and his villains have the media exposure they have because of how good they are, or did it just sort of work out that way? (Fake Strider is sure to have an opinion on this.)

The most iconic Bat villains today--at least for the majority of people--continue to be the ones that were in the '66 movie. I've heard in the past that the show helped shape what we think of when we think of Bat villains, and that Catwoman, Penguin, and Riddler weren't quite as front-and-center, villain-wise, before the show. The Joker was, of course. He had the look. He was funny and scary at the same time, and he was easy to write for. He was also a decent villain even in his earliest days, and he probably appeared more than anybody else by a long shot. It took decades to turn him into the perfect foil for Bats that he's become (Alan Moore really helped in that regard), but there was always something there.

I've read a lot of Batman and Detective Comics issues. Most of them, in fact. It's hard for me to say whether or not I agree. I will say that Two-Face seemed to be almost as big a deal as the Joker in the comics before the Adam West show came around. He didn't make it onto the show, pretty famously, because he was deemed to be too grotesque. He doesn't really become a minor villain after the show or anything, but it does feel like he takes a bit of a backseat to the four villains featured in the Adam West movie. For a while, at least.

Or maybe Two-Face had already taken a bit of a backseat thanks to the Comics Code Authority. I never really checked to see exactly how the years lined up where Two-Face was concerned. I do know that comics being published at the same time the show was on the air weren't as goofy as the show. If you go back to just after the Code took effect in '54, you'll see that the comics were incredibly goofy. They had been pretty goofy for a few years pre-Code, too, so it's not as though they did a complete one-eighty.

Through much of the forties, they were only about as goofy as the Dick Tracy strip. The goofiness really started to set in as the fifties approached. (WWII probably had something to do with this. I should look into it.)

They were still pretty goofy into the early sixties, but they abandoned a lot of the goofiness by the mid-sixties. The parents must have mellowed out by then. It had been more than a decade, after all, since EC Comics had been around to turn their boys into hooligans. Also, there was a whole new set of parents. Some of the kids who had had the comics ripped from their hands were now parents.

What the hell was I even talking about?

Rogues galleries. That's right. All I really meant to say was that maybe we'd take Flash's Rogues Gallery more seriously if he'd had a show in the sixties. Then again, maybe the reason he didn't have a show in the sixties was because his Rogues Gallery sucked.

[Mal Shot First]

All I really meant to say was that maybe we'd take Flash's Rogues Gallery more seriously if he'd had a show in the sixties. Then again, maybe the reason he didn't have a show in the sixties was because his Rogues Gallery sucked.

[Quasar]

Here's another one of those that's memorable for the wrong reasons:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The intro has a Land Before Time feel about it. It has synths instead of banjos, and the first monster they encounter is one of their own, but it's still pretty much the same. It was pretty out-of-place among nineties themes. I think came out just a year or two after the X-Men cartoon.

[Djack Zteelecock]

I've loved the 'Earthworm Jim' theme song since I first heard/watched it. It was love at first listen. Unfortunately, embedding disabled!!

http://youtu.be/PRli1rRMoSQ