We’re going way back for this one, but Adventures In Paradise starring Gardner McKay was a so-so show, but the music was great. 50’s show. All I can remember is the opening credits and the theme music.
I remember liking the shows but the ones Henry Mancini did the music for are memorable mostly for the music. Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky. Late 50’s and early 60’s. I remember the stars but little else.
Bonanza, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, The Rebel (Johnny Yuma), Rawhide, Mannix, The Bob Cummings Show, Gerald McBoing-Boing, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Others where you can hum the tune but would be hard pressed to describe anything that went on in the show?
I was trying to remember this when I put up the OP, but in Have Gun, Will Travel whenever something significant happened (seldom, as I recall) or it was about time for a commercial there was this ominous dum-dum-dum-DUM thing that would be a good signal you were supposed to be paying attention. It was a lot like those licks they had in most westerns when the Indians were about to do something nasty.
For the longest I thought Paladin’s first name was Wire!
Not too long ago I had the opportunity to see an episode of HGWT. Awful. Cheesy. Silly. Used to be a favorite show.
There was a brief spin-off of Cheers starring Carla’s ex-husband Nick. It had a catchy theme song that started something like:
“It’s hard to be a nice guy when you’re reputation’s bad.
Being goody-good must drive you absolutely mad!”
The only thing I actually remember about the show itself was Norm showing up once.
I have even more vague memories of theme songs from short-lived TV shows of my childhood in the 1970s. There was a sitcom (presumably called “Lotsa Luck,”) which had a theme song that ended:
“But in order to survive, just to keep yourself alive,
what you really need today is -”
Cut to different people, each saying “Lotsa luck!” about 5 or 6 times.
And then there was a comedy/soap set in an alternate woman-dominated world that had a sort of proto-rap theme that outlined the alt-history of this world; fragments of it pop into my head at odd moments, lines like “Adam sprang from the rib of Eve, full grown,” and “while she adminstered the gov’t, he crocheted.”
I don’t even recall the title of the show, but I think that a rose featured prominently in the opening. Does anybody else remember this?
The Texas Wheelers. I listen to their theme song all the time, since they used John Prine’s “Illegal Smile.” The oddnesss of using a song about marijuana use for a prime time family comedy is memorable.
Though I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, if only to see Mark Hamill before Star Wars.
I used to buy a pickel,
It only used to cost a nickel
And a dollar used to be worth a half a buck
But in order to survive
Just to keep yourself alive
You know the rest.
“Lotsa Luck.” A Dom DeLuise vehicle. It was created in the post-“All in the Family” days when the networks believed that stories about working people that pushed against the boundaries of good taste would be a success.
On “All in the Family,” the joke would be to hear the toilet (or, as Archie put it: “Terlet”) flush. On the first episode of “LL” <i>we got to see the toilet.</i> The episode was a long shaggy-dog story in which DeLuise had to go out, buy the toilet and install it. In the last scene, there was a ceremonial moment, with the family gathered around, of the first flush.
Then, as a kicker joke, they try to close the door and realize the toilet’s in the way.
That’s the only episode I can remember, but the theme? Etched on granite.
Yep. Can’t remember my kids’ birthdays (and I was there for one of them!), but I can remember mid-70s sit-com plots.
I don’t know if anyone in the world besides me remembers Vision On and I don’t really remember anything about it except it was the type of show I watched because I wasn’t allowed to watch anything good, ever. I had the theme music stuck in my head for years and years and this thread reminded me of it and how sick I am of not quite remembering what the show was called. So I had to go on wikipedia and look through a list of every UK TV show ever to see which one rung a bell. So the theme music is “Java” by Al Hirt. The stupidist song ever right after Yakkity Sax. For years I could see the credits in my head. It had a pen writing “Vision On” and then the words turned sideways and got mirrored so that it made the shape of a bug. I couldn’t remember what the words were though! Some guy was on it who yelled about Science. I love the theme. It’s been in my head for about 25 years now. I always used to jump around the living room to it. I downloaded it. I can’t stop listening to it. I’m never going to get sick of it.
“It’s About Time,
It’s about space,
It’s about two men in the strangest place…”
Aside from those lines, the premise of astronauts who somehow found themselves in prehistoric times, and Imogene Coca playing the main cavewoman, that’s all I’ve got.
It was an Art show aimed at the deaf, so there was almost no words spoken through most of it, and it was entirely visual. Obviously, they had to have some kind of audio for the non-deaf, so that was mostly funky odd catchy music.
It had little cartoons, like the clock numbers that were re-made into people and objects, or the council worker mole man who used to dig up odd things like whales and statues and bridges, or the girl that walked with a tortoise whose thought bubbles were cynical jokes.
The main hosts included the great artist Tony Hart, Sylvester McCoy (Seventh Doctor Who) as the guy who used to do everything backwards, and a weird Rube Goldberg-like inventor called Wilf Lunn.
From googling it, I found this site with some clips and both of the clips I looked at I remember! What a weird feeling. Now I know I will be looking at Vision On stuff all night.
OK, I might know a little more than the music of Gilligan’s Island, but I learned the words and tune to both of their theme songs as camp songs as a young girl scout, but probably never watched any actual episodes.