Earth that was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many. We found a new solar system, dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. Each one terraformed, a process taking decades, to support human life, to be new Earths. The Central Planets formed the Alliance. Ruled by an interplanetary parliament, the Alliance was a beacon of civilization. The savage outer planets were not so enlightened and refused Alliance control. The war was devastating, but the Alliance’s victory over the Independents ensured a safer universe. And now everyone can enjoy the comfort and enlightenment of our civilization.
I always liked this one:
Try this for a deep, dark secret: the great detective, Remington Steele? He doesn’t exist. I invented him. Follow. I always loved excitement, so I studied, and apprenticed, and put my name on an office. But absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so… feminine. So I invented a superior. A decidedly MASCULINE superior. Suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm… until the day HE walked in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before I knew it, he assumed Remington Steele’s identity. Now I do the work, and he takes the bows. It’s a dangerous way to live, but as long as people buy it, I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure. Well, almost never. I don’t even know his real name!
Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil! But a foolish Samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the future, where my evil is law! Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku!
The classic Superman opening:
“With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully - or desperately - toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point but not everybody could get to Lisbon directly. And so a tortuous roundabout refugee trail sprang up; Paris to Marseilles… across the Mediterranean to Oran… then by train or auto or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco. There the fortunate ones, through money or influence or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon. And from Lisbon to the new world. But the others wait in Casablanca… and wait… and wait… and wait…”
Casablanca (1942)
I love all the openings to Babylon 5, but I think season 3 was probably the best.
Just what I came in to post
"The Babylon project was our last best hope for peace. It failed. But in the year of the shadow war, it became something greater, our last best hope for victory. The year is 2260, the place Babylon 5. "
Especially when the first two seasons started with the same first sentence (“The Babylon project was our last best hope for peace”), followed by an optimistic description of the station. When I heard the Season 3 monologue for the first time, I literally gasped.
Me, too.
Kung Fu seemed to change its opening a lot, but it used this narration by Master Kan in a few episodes:
It is said that a Shaolin priest can walk through walls. Looked for, he cannot be seen. Listened for, he cannot be heard. Touched, he cannot be felt.
This rice paper is the test. When you can walk its length, and leave no trace, you will have learned.
How about the opening monologue from one of the best concept albums ever? Especially since it was spoken by Richard Burton!
"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us…”
Jeff Wayne – The War of the Worlds
As we’ve discussed recently on these Boards, the biggest difference between the TV opening and the Fleischer cartoon opening Iinked to above is that the Fleischer opening has Superman fighting for “Truth, Justice” (without even an “and” between them), while the TV opening has “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”, which was evidently taken from the WWII-era radio show opening.
The Third Man (1949)
“I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We’d run anything if people wanted it enough - mmm - had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs but you know they can’t stay the course like a professional. Now the city - it’s divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the center of the city that’s international policed by an International Patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn’t really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit. Oh, I was gonna tell you, wait, I was gonna tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name is Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don’t know, some sort of job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent.”
- Note: this is from the longer, British version. In the American version, Joseph Cotten does a slightly different intro as Holly Martins.
Well in that vein, you also have Orson Welles in the intro to the updated version of The Alan Parsons Project’s “Tales of Mystery and Imagination”, channeling Edgar Allen Poe:
For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that which I conceived it. There is however a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language. These fancies arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at epochs of most intense tranquility – when the bodily and mental health are in perfection – and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams. And so I captured this fancy, where all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
If I’m not mistaken, Welles did the same intro for his version of War of the Worlds in 1938.
Ninja’d! 
Sure, but you really need the cheesy 1950s special effects. Plus it’s the version I grew up with.
Hi-Yo, Silver! A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-Yo Silver’… The Lone Ranger! With his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoof-beats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again!
Ah, there it is. My house, and good old Cleveland Street. How could I ever forget it? And there I am, with that dumb round face and that stupid stocking cap. Oh, but no matter. Christmas was on its way. Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas, around which the entire kid year revolved.
The Right Stuff:
There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, 750 miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it: The sound barrier. Then, they built a small plane, the X-1, to try and break the sound barrier. And men came to the High Desert in California to ride it. They were called test pilots. And no one knew their names.