In an effort to cleanse my eyes of the filthy residue left over from Highlander: The Suck, er, The Source, I’ve begun re-watching my DVDs of Highlander: The Series. And considering that I haven’t done a TV Title Sequence entry in a while, well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this one…

It’s not uncommon for title sequences to evolve as the show goes along: the theme music changes, background visuals get updated with more recent footage, cast members come and go. But I can’t think of any other series that had as many distinct variants of their openings as Highlander. There were at least four major ones, and probably several minor ones as well if you obsessively cataloged every little tweak that was made over the show’s six-season run. The problem was the same one I always run into whenever I try to write or talk about the show, which is the need to somehow convey a lot of pretty far-out backstory for first-time viewers who don’t know a Quickening from a Kwik-E-Mart. The premise and formula of Highlander isn’t really that complicated once you’ve watched a couple of episodes, but I still remember how baffling it was to be thrown into the first movie with no prior knowledge of what the hell was going on, and the showrunners were surely aware of that newbie reaction.

Here’s their first attempt to spell it all out:

It looks cheap, Adrian Paul’s accent is… odd,* and it’s kind of bombastic and silly, but I actually like this one. It captures the flavor of the first season (and of early ’90s syndicated action shows, for that matter) very well. I also like that Duncan is introducing himself instead of having someone else do the honors (as it’s done in later seasons), and of course this version features the lovely Alexandra Vandernoot, who was written out of the show (by her own request) in Season 2.

The sequence was reworked midway through the first season, losing some of the “sliding background” effect and gaining the the signature title font that the show would use for the rest of its run, as well as tweaking Duncan’s voiceover a bit.
By Season 3, the show was a good deal less cheap-looking and more serious in tone, and the revamped titles reflected this — for the record, I think this is probably my favorite version; Joe’s narration is almost pitch-perfect, and the tone is very mysterious and evocative of ancient secrets — but I’d say it’s the Season 4 version that is the show’s signature for most fans, and which most accurately conveys the show’s complete emotional palette:

I just wish they hadn’t used that cheesy end line: “May it be Duncan MacLeod… the Highlander!” That always struck me as a little too rah-rah-sis-boom-bah, or something. Regardless, though, I have very fond memories of all these sequences, playing out in my dark bedroom in the wee hours after I’d gotten home from a late night running projectors at the movie theater. It was a good time in my life. I miss it…

* Although it’s certainly no odder than Christopher Lambert’s Scottish-French mishmash dialect in the original movie!