More Depressing TV Intros

- How could I forget about the intro for the Coy and Vance episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard? Apparently the producers thought that if they showed both new guys with their shirts off, we'd hate them less. We didn't.



- Another milestone in TV opening sequences that are really anguished cries for help: "Golden Palace."



- Season 8 of "Diff'rent Strokes" reminds us that when shows have suffered major cast departures and are completely exhausted, they will a) Re-record the theme song in a "hipper" arrangement and b) Create a new title sequence where we see how much the characters have grown up. (They think that by showing old clips of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges, we'll feel a sense of how far we've come with these characters. They don't realize that all we're thinking is "these guys are too old for this schtick.")



- "The New WKRP in Cincinnati," a direct-to-syndication mediocrity. Hard to say which is more gloom-inducing: the shots of the three original cast members, or the shots of the five new cast members that nobody liked.

Depressing TV Intros

Not only can TV title sequences get you in the mood for a show, they can also be unbelievably depressing when they accompany a show that has Jumped the Shark™. Has there ever been a title sequence more soul-crushing to watch than the final season of Laverne and Shirley, when Shirley was gone, Lenny had abandoned Squiggy (to make This is Spinal Tap) and they had to bring in a bunch of kids just to do the "Schlemiel, Schlemazl" bit? Particularly sad is the shot that accompanies the now-inaccurate title -- Laverne dancing with two versions of herself, just to make it look like the show is still about more than one person.



Or how about the last seson of The A-Team? The new arrangement of the theme song -- which sounds like a very early version of a custom cell phone ring -- practically screams "we've been re-tooled in a desperate attempt to revive a show that should have been canceled two years ago."



And once the opening voice-over of Charlie's Angels contained the line "Two of them graduated from the police academy, the other graduated from a top school for models," you knew it was over, even if Aaron Spelling didn't.

Shorter Main Titles (No, This Isn't a "Shorter..." Post, It's Really About Making Things Shorter)

A while back I made, but never got around to doing anything with, some 20-to-30-second "condensed" versions for intros from older TV shows. The idea was to see if I could get as much of the gist of the original sequence as possible while keeping it under 30 seconds (since no show today, except on premium cable, is permitted to have an intro that's longer than 30 seconds).

All I discovered, really, is that a longer intro is usually more effective than a short one. And we already knew that. But the one that I thought worked pretty well was The Rockford Files: with just the answering-machine message followed by the last few notes of the theme song, it has the most important part of the intro intact and still has musical punctuation for the joke.



I also tried to come up with a short Laverne And Shirley that would keep the most important bits from the intro (the introduction, Lenny and Squiggy, the glove, the girls looking dreamy, the girls running off to work) while shortening the theme song and, in the modern fashion, putting the show title at the end.



I also tried to do a really short Mary Tyler Moore, shorter even than the shorter title sequence that they sometimes used on the actual show. This is just too short for it to make any sense, I think. I sometimes feel like a show would be better off having no title sequence rather than a 15-20 second one; it just feels like a buildup to something that never comes.



Other older shows, like Bob Newhart, actually alternate intros that ran 30 seconds or a little more, which they would use in episodes that ran long (so they could take time out of the main title instead of cutting the episode proper). And other shows actually did have very short intros, like The Dick Van Dyke Show.