It’s Friday morning and time for another wander down televisual memory lane. Given the subject matter of the only entry I’ve managed to write this week, I’ll bet you smart kids out there in the audience can guess which TV opening we’re about to see…
As I recall, the title sequence for The Muppet Show varied a little bit for each of the five years it was on the air, and there were also week-to-week variations consisting of a different “cold opening” — the little gag before the music starts, usually featuring that week’s guest star — for each episode, a fresh grumble from Statler and Waldorf (the two grouchy old guys in the balcony), and a unique closing gag involving Gonzo and his trumpet. YouTube has several different examples; naturally, I had to choose this one featuring Mark Hamill (who turned 57 yesterday; happy birthday, Mark!) and the droids from Star Wars. Well, Empire, judging from Luke’s outfit.
The Muppet Show ran on Sunday afternoons around these parts, which meant I was usually at my grandma’s house and competing with the grown-up menfolk for control of the TV. I rarely had much success at talking them into switching from the football game to a Ray Harryhausen movie, Star Trek, or — god forbid! — Space: 1999, but The Muppet Show was another matter. That was something pretty much everyone liked, even grandma, who frankly didn’t understand why we had to have the TV on at all when there was so much “visitin'” to be done. But she did like those “crazy puppets.” Didn’t we all?
In light of the occasion, how could I not post this particular title sequence?
For you trivia hounds out there, this is not the title sequence from the premiere movie that aired thirty years ago tonight. “Saga of a Star World” had more cinematic titles, without the “mugshot” visuals of the cast, simply words receding into the distance, something like the titles for Superman: The Movie, which I believe had debuted earlier that summer.
These titles came with the show’s first regular episode; the sequence was later shortened somewhat, and the opening voiceover by Patrick Macnee was dropped. A pity… I always liked that voiceover. Yeah, I suppose the “life here began out there” angle sounds silly now, but back in the day this stuff raised the hair on our arms, kids… because we had these things called imaginations.
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.
Today’s title sequence is something of a departure in that I don’t actually remember this one. I remember the show — this is the one I mentioned the other day that I used to think I might have imagined — and there are some familiar elements in the video clip, but the sequence as a whole is a total blank spot. See if it rings a bell for you:
It’s Friday, let’s watch some TV! And since I mentionedThe Incredible Hulk the other day, I’ll bet you can guess what today’s selection is, can’t you?
The first few seconds of this, with the flashing red light, big intimidating machine powering into place, and the urgent tinkle of a piano, still raise the hair on my arms, and the line “don’t make me angry… you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” is, of course, a classic catchphrase that still lives in the pop-cultural zeitgeist. But what I really notice watching this sequence now is how bloody long it is. Many TV shows these days don’t have any opening titles at all, of course, but even by the standards of the late ’70s and early ’80s — the heyday of cool opening title sequences, in my not-so-humble opinion — this one must be a contender for the longest. (The person who posted this clip on YouTube does note that this is the original version of the opening and that it was cut down somewhat for later episodes, but even losing 20 seconds, this thing still runs over a minute!) I also like how it explains through the voice-over exactly what the show is all about. That’s not so critical on a typical drama about cops or doctors, but genre series often fail because newcomers have a hard time getting up to speed if they don’t see the first episode or three. Would it have made a difference if the much-lamented, dead-before-it-had-a-chance series Firefly had had some kind of opening narration every week to explain why people in that show were riding horses and dressed like extras from Little House on the Prairie while spaceships thundered by overhead? Maybe, maybe not — Firefly had a lot of cards stacked against it — but it probably wouldn’t have hurt.
As I said in my previous Hulk entry, this show wasn’t one of my favorites — I’ll be honest, I don’t remember any specific storylines or scenes the way I do from other series, even ones I saw when I was very little — but I was a fairly regular viewer of it, and I did enjoy it. One aspect of the show that did make a huge impression on me was the typical episode ending, in which David Banner walked away from the camera along an (often) deserted road, occasionally putting his thumb out to try and hitch a ride, while an incredibly melancholy piano tune (appropriately called “The Lonely Man Theme”) played in the background. I was a sensitive kid, keenly aware of the suffering of others, and these endings always struck me as unbearably sad and horrible that poor David was all alone like that. I remember my eyes welling up on more than one occasion as I sat on our living room hearth with the fire hot on my back, the TV on the other side of the warm, bright room, and my parents in their chairs (no doubt wondering why the hell their weird son was crying over the friggin’ Hulk), and imagined what it must be like to have no friends or allies, no home, no destination, just the open road and a gathering thunderstorm up ahead. As lame as it sounds, that damn piano still makes my eyes burn a little:
You probably all saw this coming after yesterday’s entry, right? Sometimes I am so predictable… Oh, well. You gotta be what you are, right? Just watch the clip:
John Kenneth Muir, notable expert on all things retro (at least when you define “retro” as the crap I grew up watching on TV in the ’70s and ’80s, and the toysI played with during the same period), today reminded me of a series I haven’t thought about in years, a short-lived horror anthology called Darkroom.
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember any of the stories from this show. Even the episode that Muir summarizes in the blog entry I linked above sounds only vaguely familiar, at best. But this opening… man, I remember this. It always gave me a good case of the willies:
Something about the way movies and TV shows were made in the ’70s and early ’80s was perfectly suited for the horror genre. Maybe it was the graininess of the film stock — since we’ve gone digital, everything looks too slick and polished, so modern horror films have to re-introduce grime through artificial means, and they always lay it on too thick (I hate the dank, sweaty, grungy look of modern horror films!). Whatever it was, I miss it. It could make even a show like Darkroom, which was probably pretty cheesy, look like something. The title card shot with the red light bulb above the logo is just perfect. You know, that’d look really good on a t-shirt…
Writing about Space: 1999 earlier reminded me that I haven’t posted a TV series opener for awhile. So, without further ado…
This was a typical opening sequence for the show’s first season. (It ran two years, but was pretty thoroughly retooled in the second year, including a whole new title sequence; this is the opener I remember, however, especially that shot of the Eagle falling out of the sky and exploding… man, that stuck in my mind for years, even during the long, hazy period before DVDs and the Internet enabled me to refresh my memories.) Space used a rather unorthodox technique of showing part of the current week’s episode in the titles, as a kind of teaser, I suppose. (This particular opener is from an episode called “Black Sun,” if you’re interested.) The end result was that the title sequence was just a little bit different every week. I’m not aware of any other show that ever did that.
Watching it now, the music strikes me as over-the-top melodrama and bombast that didn’t entirely represent the tone of the series — which was very brooding and cerebral in the first year — but it’s catchy. Just try getting it out of your head. Go on, try.
I mentioned The Wonder Yearsyesterday, so it seems appropriate to make that show’s opening our TV Title Sequence for this week. My research — okay, the two minutes I spent perusing YouTube — indicates that the 30-second version of the opening I’ve been seeing on those nightly re-runs on the Ion channel is actually cut down from the original sequence, which I had forgotten ran much longer when the show first aired. Here’s the full-length, one-minute version as it appeared in the show’s first four seasons, circa 1988-1991:
In yesterday’s blatheration about the new Flash Gordon series, I made several references to previous versions of the story. The best known of these are, of course, the 1930s-vintagemovieserials starring Buster Crabbe, and the 1980 feature film with the so-cheesy-it’s-awesome soundtrack by the rock group Queen. However, there have also been a number of Flash television shows over the years, including an animated version that debuted in 1979. Known variously as The New Adventures of Flash Gordon, The Adventures of Flash Gordon, or just plain Flash Gordon, this series was a weekly Saturday-morning must-see for me:
This series is available on DVD, but honestly, I’m half-afraid to watch it again, because it might not hold up to my adult scrutiny and I don’t want to ruin a fond memory. Even so, there are a lot of things in that clip above that still look good to me: rocketships, robots, ray guns, alien creatures, exotic landscapes, giant drilling machines tunneling beneath the ground, and scantily clad women with swords in hand… ah, now that’s Flash Gordon, in all its pulpy, comic-strippy glory! Somehow, I doubt the Sci-Fi Channel’s take on the material will quite live up to this standard…
