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:
