Most Title Sequences In One Year?
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 10 Comments
One thing I regret most about the disappearance of full-length title sequences is that we can’t use them to track the changes in a show. Every time a show is re-tooled, it needs to change its title sequence to reflect the changes, and even when it hasn’t been changed much, a show that’s in trouble might change the main title to make the premise clearer or create a different atmosphere. We saw a good example of this in the final season of Veronica Mars, where they created a new main title that emphasized the noir detective-show feel and re-mixed the theme song to be less chipper.
But back when shows had minute-long main titles, and those main titles were often right at the beginning of the episode (and were therefore the first thing you saw of the show) they might change not only in successive seasons but successive weeks, as the producers scrambled to find the right approach.
This came home to me watching the recently-released season 1 DVD of My Two Dads, a show I liked at the time and still like now: I had forgotten that it had no less than four different main titles in the first half of the first season (and it had others in later seasons). So here they are, in another one of my “trace the history of a show through its opening titles” posts. First comes the pilot, which is just a 30-second selection of clips with a fairly generic instrumental theme song. What was with the ’80s and saxophones? Did the economy rebound from the 1981-2 recession entirely on the strength of the saxophone industry, and what musical instrument is going to save us now?
For the series, they need a new theme song, and they create the famous, insidious “You Can Count On Me” (co-written by star Greg Evigan and creator Michael Jacobs, sung by Evigan), the most maniacally happy and non-specific of all sitcom theme songs. The producers decide that the title sequence should be a combination of live-action and animation in the style of A-Ha’s then-popular video for “Take On Me,” and the sequence illustrates the theme of the show, that you’ve got this girl being raised and influenced by two men from different worlds. This sequence must have cost a lot of money to make, but it only lasted somewhere between one and three episodes before being replaced, and all that money was flushed down the toilet. And did I mention the saxophone was used a lot in this era?
The producers and the network presumably realized that it wasn’t enough to just illustrate the theme of the show; it needed to be explained or nobody would know Continue…
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The "Do Not Disturb" Guy Talks About Honesty and Truth, and Other Tales of the New Season
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments
I’m working on another “Better Know a Writing Staff” post, hopefully for later today, but while researching, I came across this article from late August taking “A Look At New Fall Shows,” with interviews with the creators and casting directors of some of the big new shows — some of which have already bombed.
The article is from Back Stage, a magazine for actors, and so the interviews focus on the opportunities that these new shows might provide for unknown actors, particularly in small parts (like, how many small parts and guest parts will it have, and what kind of people is it looking for?). But it also provides some insight into why some of the less-successful shows turned out the way they did. The section on Do Not Disturb‘s creator Abraham Higginbotham is, unwittingly, the best analysis of why that show was instantly doomed (last-minute casting choices, uncertainty of tone, etc).
The section on the casting process for Life On Mars is a lot of fun, too:
“But we want actors who have the look and shape of the ’70s,” he says. “That look is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.” Put another way, he says: Tattoos, nose rings, and sculpted bodies were not in vogue 35 years ago. None of this means actors should arrive at the audition wearing costumes that scream disco. But a hint of the era might work, such as eyeliner for women or Afros for African Americans. “Not wigs,” cautions Appelbaum. “But if an actor has a natural Afro, contact us immediately.”
