Simple Tricks and Nonsense

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?

Posted by at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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.

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences: Highlander: The Series" »

Posted by at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequence: The Fantastic Journey" »

Posted by at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's Friday, let's watch some TV! And since I mentioned The Incredible Hulk the other day, I'll bet you can guess what today's selection is, can't you?

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences: The Incredible Hulk" »

Posted by at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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:

Mmmmmm, so very, very '80s...

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences: Max Headroom" »

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 toys I 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...

Posted by at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I've been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents' place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I've spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM'ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That's been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn"; now, three hours later, I'm listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven't been able to decide which...)

You know what, though? I'm okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It's felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I've been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I've been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn't turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It's luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.

And if that's not enough, I've found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:

Continue reading "Random 'Net Crap on a Saturday Afternoon" »

Posted by at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I mentioned The Wonder Years yesterday, 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:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences: The Wonder Years" »

Posted by at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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-vintage movie serials 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...

Posted by at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's do another one, shall we?

As the decade of the '80s progressed, TV action heroes began to evolve from detectives into characters we can call, for lack of a better word, "troubleshooters." These guys were less concerned with figuring out whodunnit mysteries than with helping the downtrodden find justice. Like the private dicks they descended from, these characters were mavericks and renegades who operated outside the law, occasionally working for shadowy organizations whose exact nature was never disclosed, but just as often functioning as "indepedent contractors." The good-hearted mercenaries who composed The A-Team are one example of these troubleshooter characters; the world's ultimate tinkerer MacGyver is another. But the ones I really grooved on -- naturally -- were the ones that threw some science-fiction hardware into the mix. Knight Rider is probably the best known of these. Personally, I much preferred heavily armed, supersonic-capable, computerized stealth helicopters to silly talking cars:

I hear this theme music in my head everytime I see a helicopter, especially if it's just in the process of powering up and lifting off. Of course, the fact that our local AirMed choppers are the same Bell 222 model used to protray the Airwolf probably has something to do with that...

Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's title sequence is actually a suggestion sent along by Chenopup; it's the opening from another of those early '80s detective shows we all loved so much, a Stephen J. Cannell series called Riptide. I've got to be honest, I don't remember this one very well. I know I watched it, and I seem to recall that the three leads had all served together in Vietnam (not that there's anything unique about that; all the early-80s TV detectives were 'Nam vets). I believe at least one of them lived on the boat that gave the show its name, too, but I'm not sure and the Wikipedia entry for the show is unclear on this point. In any event, it's an enjoyable title sequence and another good Mike Post/Pete Carpenter theme song (although it loses a couple of points in my book for sounding so much like the Simon & Simon theme):

Posted by at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I mentioned Magnum, PI in the the previous entry and, as best I can recall, it aired on the same night as Simon & Simon (I think it was Thursday, Magnum first, then S&S... and yes, it frightens me that I remember that!), so why don't we have a look at the opening for Tom Selleck's best-known work?

I don't know about you, but that got my heart pounding. I think this opening, along with the one from Miami Vice, are probably the best title sequences of the '80s, brilliant pairings of exciting, memorable music with the perfect visuals.

Oddly, though, this was not Magnum's original opening. For roughly half of the first season, the show had completely different theme music, and a somewhat different montage of visuals beneath it. Have a look:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences I Like: Magnum, PI" »

Posted by at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I'm sure you can imagine with the news about my dog and all, I've been in kind of a funk the last few days. And where do I turn when I'm feeling down? Where else but to that wondrous opiate of the modern masses, television! Or, as Homer Simpson once called it, "Teacher, mother, secret lover." So, in that spirit, let's take a look at yet another TV title sequence that I've always thought was tres cool, or at the very least, entertaining:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences I Like: Simon & Simon" »

Posted by at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know if anyone else is enjoying this TV Title Sequence thing I've been doing, but I am sure am having fun hunting down this stuff, some of which I haven't seen or thought about in years. Today's selection is from one of my Saturday-morning faves when I was a kid, a 1960s-vintage cartoon that continued running (I believe) well into the 1980s: Jonny Quest. If you don't recall the show, Jonny Quest was just about the perfect series ever created for ten-year-old boys (and a whole lot of girls!). It followed the adventures of the titular character, who is, not surprisingly, about ten or twelve years old, as he travels the world with his father, globally renowned scientist and inventor, Dr. Benton Quest. Along for the ride are Jonny's friend Hadji (who can be read through a modern lens as an unfortunate stereotype, but in simpler, less-uptight times would've been just a damn cool kid to have as a buddy, what with his snake-charming powers and such), the obligatory yappy-dog Bandit for comic relief (which, admittedly, was never terribly funny, even when I was ten), and Dr. Quest's assistant, driver, bodyguard, sidekick, and regular right-hand man, Race Bannon. (Modern-day po-mo ironists take note of the fact that there are no women in the series and speculate about the true nature of Race and Benton's relationship, if you get my meaning. I suppose it's possible they were lovers; I prefer to see them as brothers-in-arms who, in the words of Indiana Jones' sidekick Short Round, have "no time for love." The show is, after all, a ten-year-old boy's vision of the world, as yet uncorrupted by such grown-up things as sexual chemistry.)

The title sequence for the show plays as a montage of greatest hits from previous episodes:

Yeah, that's great stuff with the jazzy, brassy, jangly-guitary, mid-60s-style music and the whole Kennedy-era sense of derring-do and "science will conquer all" attitude. As you can see from the clip, Jonny Quest covered a lot of territory: fantasy (dinosaurs), horror (the mummy episode), high adventure (the jungle stuff), science fiction (the eyeball/spider robot -- which always gave me a major case of The Willies -- and the assorted ray-guns, lasers, and blasters), spy thriller, and just plain old two-fisted, rifle-shooting, manly-man action. I know there have been a couple of attempts to revive and update the show -- one particularly oddball version in the mid-90s featured Jonny entering a CG virtual reality in every episode, as I recall -- but none of them came close to the innocent, pulp-fiction fun of the original. This is one of the very few kiddie cartoons that I'd like to have on DVD...

Posted by at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just in case anyone couldn't be bothered to click that link in the previous entry, I thought I'd go ahead and post up the intro for one of my favorite childhood series, The Six Million Dollar Man. I haven't seen the show in years, and I have half a hunch that it wouldn't hold up to my adult scrutiny, but I think this opening is still insanely dramatic and exciting:

I love those animated "computer graphics." My three Loyal Readers probably know what I'm going to say next: I still have my old Steve Austin doll. I've got his arch-enemy Maskatron, too, and the inflatable command base, "Bionic Mission Vehicle," and the rocket ship that turns into a medical bay. I never did have the Bigfoot doll, though... I might have to go questing on eBay...

Posted by at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Evanier announced something interesting today: "Off and on... I'm going to link to videos of openings I liked for TV shows. In some cases, I didn't like the show but I liked the opening." This is an idea I've been toying with for quite a while, if for no other reason than to let me dig up YouTube clips of things I haven't seen in a long, long time and wallow in a momentary glow of nostalgia for all the dreck that shaped me into the charming fellow I am today. Without further ado, here's my first entry in this whole new category of blogging:

Continue reading "TV Title Sequences I Like: Hardcastle and McCormick" »

Posted by at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must've been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual time slots of the shows I loved: Voyagers! was on Sunday nights and Gold Monkey was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube...

Be that as it may, Gold Monkey was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to Raiders of the Lost Ark; both were set in the '30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so of course one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn't care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I've since decided that Gold Monkey was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and Have Not than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the '80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the '83-'84 season, Gold Monkey was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!

While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here's the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer Mike Post. I miss opening title sequences...

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wow, here's an announcement I never thought I'd read: the TV series Voyagers! will be released on DVD on July 17th.

What's that? You say you've never heard of Voyagers!? Well, I'm not surprised. It lasted only a single season, but it made a huge impression on me. Aimed squarely at the 10-14 year old market, the show was about a handsome-but-lunkheaded time traveler who accidentally picks up a 10-year-old companion, then finds himself unable to return the kid to his own time. Not that the kid wants to go... you see, he's a history buff and an orphan, so blazing through the past is far more appealing than growing up in a boring old foster home in 1982. And his knowledge of history comes in useful, because our grown-up Voyager lost his handy guidebook and doesn't know crap about any of the events they keep finding themselves in the middle of.

It was all pretty silly and self-consciously educational in the way of early-80s kidvid, but I'm pretty sure this is one I'll still enjoy. I've already earmarked my $49.98 for the set. Now, if only somebody would get to work on Tales of the Gold Monkey...

Here are the opening credits for Voyagers!, which should give you a taste of the show if you don't remember it, or generate a nice nostalgic glow if you do:

Posted by at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)