Weird old title sequences: Police Squad! (1982)

Before The Naked Gun came Police Squad!, a short-lived TV spoof of other cop shows. Reams could be written about it, but if you’ve watched The Naked Gun, you know as much as you need to know.

But I will talk about the title sequence, which changed every week: it’s motif was that the supposed guest star would die in the title sequence and never appear in the show itself and that the wrong episode title would be read out each time.

The end titles were also very Naked Gun.

You just don’t get that level of attention to detail these days.

Oh, incidentally, and I used to work somewhere once where they all thought I was Johnny the shoe-shine guy, because I was the source of all knowledge and not because I cleaned shoes:

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.