Shame: I will eat a big plate of fuckin bugs if you can find a worse opening credits sequence than the one that was used for The Ropers. Holy fuck, uninspired much?
You can’t do it. I fuckin defy you to find worse opening credits. I’m not even a vain man. Fuck you. You can’t do it. This played during Prime Time, for more than a fuckin YEAR, mind you:
The opening to Seinfeld wasn’t exactly inspired. Especially after they dropped the stand-up/brick wall bit, it was just the short “DAAH-Whum” instrumental and some credits played over the show itself. They didn’t even try.
As for Seinfeld, I always thought it was an inspired choice not to have a theme song, or intro, or some other way to waste a half-minute of airtime: just some instantly recognizable slap-bass, and then let’s get started. It suggested to me that, unlike other shows, they had more material than they could use, and didn’t want to waste time repeating the same intro for every show.
I’d put MAS*H’s opening credits in the HoF. It’s iconic, and nicely encapsulates the mood and setting of the show.
Props also to Gilligan’s Island, for the succinct introduction to the show’s premise and the sea-chanty vibe their theme song has.
Hall of Shame? Nothing consistently terrible comes to mind. I didn’t like it when the Cosby Show started doing a “hip music/dance” thing over the opening credits, the characters just looked stupid to me. But Cosby Show went through several opening-credits phases.
(I figure everyone else is going to say “Star Trek” or “I Love Lucy.” Eh, well and good, but I’ll throw in a few dark horsies.)
•Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has an opening that needs to be burned onto a golden disc and fired into space onboard the next Voyager probe. (Sadly, it loses a bit on YouTube—it’s really best on TV or DVD. With the volume turned way up.)
•And “Bonanza,” of course. It’s beyond classic.
•Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego. Not the live-action Rockapella version—the animated epic with score by Mr. Mozart. (Kind of a creepy ending, though, nowadays.)
And I’ve always had a soft spot for Sonic the Hedgehog (the non-sucky series) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. (In the spirit of the OP, whatever editor chose the fuckin clips for the latter deserves a fuckin medal. Freakin’ Ay.)
As for “shame,” hmmm…
"The Proud Family"s intro makes me want to murder every character on that show with some kind of machine tool. But I want to do that anyway, despite the theme song, so that probably shouldn’t count against it.
Stephen J. Cannell (The A Team, Hunter, everything else on NBC with guns during the 1980’s) notoriously kept his production costs down by running the logest possible ending credits, between freeze-frame clips of the show you just watched.
I think that, generally speaking, the credits for the various seasons of *Buffy *were pretty awesome. They took an unknown song, made it iconic, and captured the energy of the show well.
But extra special props have to go out to the opening credits of Season 4’s Superstar, if only because it made 2 million fans say “What the fuck?!” all at once.*
*The suave looking dark haired fella was in fact an uberdweeb who was not part of the Scooby Gang. But this episode was about his working a spell rewriting everyone’s memories of him as the coolest vampire fighter in town. The conceit even extended to the credits, which were re-edited with him being the leader of the team.
Surely The Simpsons belongs in this Hall of Fame, with all the jokes and variaions (Bart’s writing on the board, lisa’s solo, the couch gag, and sometimes other randomness as well).
I think the Mickey Mouse Club deserves some place of honor, too. It’s a surprisingly long original piece of animation. It was always broadcast in black and white, but it was filmed in color (and I’ve recently seen it, finally). The full opening is much longer than the one I grew up on. as a mainstream Baby bomer, I was just too young to catch this during its original run. I saw it in syndication, by which time it had been cut down (probably to allow them to broadcast more commercials).
Star Tek Voyager had the best visuals of any of the shows in the franchise. It’s partly an effort to show off the CGI, I know, but it seems more directed than the other post-1987 entries, and still holds up well.
I hate the opening credits from the later years of Boy Meets World. The show started out really funny, and it had an instrumental theme that was fairly un-memorable. Then it got really crappy and acquired a cheesy theme song to match. It had awful lyrics that consisted only of the following:
“When this boy meets wor-orld,
Boy meets world.
Wandrin’ down this road that we call lie-eeefe!
When this boy meets…wooooorld.”
Ingredients for a bad theme song: Just repeat the name of the show a few times, and throw in half of a cliche! You actually saw this with a lot of TGIF-type shows. Remember Step by Step? Ugh! Bad!
Hall of Fame: Hawaii 5-0, mainly for the music, but also for that stop-start bit with the hula girl. Also, and I’m not sure this is well known outside the UK, Thunderbirds - think big-budget disaster movie enacted by marionettes.
Hall of fame award to Mark Snow for the brilliantly creepy opening music for The X-Files (and all his other work on the show and movie), with honourable mention to The Daily Show and Colbert Report themes.
Hall of shame goes to Enterprise’s opening credits because, really, WTF?!?!
