When Television Was Awesome

I just stumbled upon the intro to Space 1999 and I was blown away. I remembered it being cool but I had completely forgotten just how cool. Anyway, it got me thinking: What are the all-time great beginnings to television shows. I'm not talking theme music. I'm talking about the marriage of great theme music with awesome visuals. Three that immediately come to mind are below.


Space 1999
This is awesome for so many reasons that should be obvious - the overly dramatic theme, the quick cuts of non-action scenes including people walking and people standing, the title cards that scream at you hints of what's to come in tonight's episode. I could go on and on.




The Streets of San Francisco
This might be my all time favorite. One of the channels years ago used to run this all the time. I was addicted. I love it for the funky theme and the off-beat cuts. Also, the graphics of the bars sliding in to reveal the actors is brilliant. Quinn Martin productions always had guest stars, which was code for we can't pay them enough so we put their faces and names in the opening sequence as part of their salary. Every episode had a title, four acts, and an epilogue where we most likely learned our lesson.

The Rockford Files
I would have embedded the video but the guy that uploaded it to YouTube disabled embedding. Dunno why. Anyway you can view it there if you click on the link above. I love it for the answering machine message at the beginning which always somehow poked fun at Rockford's condition in life. Right when the punchline of the message hit the theme started not unlike the snare/cymbal kick that horrible comedian's used to use to drive jokes home. The visuals for the opening sequence are actually stills but are edited to infer motion. It's really kind of cool and something that I always wanted to rip off when I was still considering doing that kind of thing for a living.