We’re back with “soundtracks” this week, but this time, I want to know what your favorite theme song is! Theme songs used to be a big thing in the world of television, until the advertisers really got their hooks in and squeezed more time out of shows, and creators adjusted by cutting extraneous stuff to the bone. Like, you know, theme songs. I always liked theme songs, and miss them a bit — not so much as I sit in a darkened room eating large blocks of cheese and weeping into my Yoo-hoo, but a little bit. They were fun.
I thought of this Question because, recently, one of the networks on DirecTV (Great Entertainment Television) began playing The Rockford Files from its beginning (the TV movie with Lindsay Wagner!), and, man, The Rockford Files had a great theme song:
That might be my favorite opening credits — not only is the song good, but I love the scenes of Rockford doing his thing around the town. However, it’s not my favorite theme song. I tend to like theme songs with lyrics, because who doesn’t like to song along?
Some of my favorites are:
The Greatest American Hero (which, of course, also gave us the greatest answering machine tape ever):
The Dukes of Hazzard (with the added bonus of Catherine Bach in a bikini):
Moonlighting:
Welcome Back, Kotter:
The super-long version from WKRP in Cincinnati:
My favorite, though, is kind of boring, and that’s the theme song for Cheers. Cheers is one of my favorite shows ever, and the song really hits me where I live. As in, I’m just a sentimental chump, and the song is packed full of sentimentality (and a little transphobia, but hey, it was the Eighties):
So that’s my answer. I know there are a ton of other choices: Hawaii 5-0‘s is pretty awesome, as is The A-Team‘s, we have Mission: Impossible (which isn’t my favorite simply because I was too young to watch), all the fun sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, Three’s Company, The Facts of Life … you know them all! If you can think of one from more recent days — “Long Hard Times to Come,” which is the theme of Justified, is danged cool — feel free to throw it on in there, because some shows actually do have theme songs these days (Game of Thrones has a cool theme, for instance), even if a lot don’t. You know you have one!
Oh, I’ve got a whole long list of favorite TV theme songs/music (over at the Classic Comics Forum, in one of the music threads, a bunch of members submitted their top 10 favorite TV themes last year). But I won’t bore everyone with that – except to say that a few of those you mentioned, like Rockford Files, Hawaii 5-0 and WKRP made my list as well (I’d add that I like WKRP’s hard-rocking closing credits theme, with its deliberately nonsense lyrics, almost as good as the main theme).
So here’s my favorite, which is basically the best theme music of all time:
The Sanford & Son theme, also known as “Streetbeater” by the late, great Quincy Jones.