Weird old title sequences

Sometimes the title of a TV show more or less tells you what it’s about. Let’s roll back to 1967 now for ABC’s The Flying Nun, an adaptation of the book, The Fifteenth Pelican. It starred Sally Field (then famous as a surfer girl on Gidget but obviously now more famous for Smokey and the Bandit, Brothers and Sisters, Steel Magnolias, ER and Mrs Doubtfire) as well… can you guess?

Yes, she played a nun who could fly. Hence, The Flying Nun.

The general idea was that

1. She had a very big cornette
2. She was quite small and light
3. The wind would catch the cornette
4. And she would take flight

Now, this was a sitcom, so each week, Sister Bertrille would come across someone or something who needed her help and usually by the end of the episode, she’d have fixed the whole situation, typically by taking flight – to much amusement.

Now, in case you think writers can’t milk an idea for all its worth (and then some), The Flying Nun lasted three seasons for a total of 82, 24-minute episodes. Yes, 82 ways in which a nun flying could help the world and bring laughter to an audience. And in case you ever thought directors and propmen/propwomen were a talentless bunch, for most of the first season, Field was pregnant. A pregnant nun who’s light enough to fly. That took some interesting blocking.

Aren’t these TV folk ingenious?

There’s not much else to say about The Flying Nun, though, except that the Roman Catholic church praised it for humanising the work of nuns. Did it also give people false expectations of nuns? That, I cannot say.

Cue the weird old titles for The Flying Nun – in case you were in any doubt about the show’s premise, the titles did all they could to explain it with the subtlety of a V2 rocket. And if that whet’s your appetite, the show’s available on DVD.

One of those glorious trends of US TV in the 70s and 80s was “Me, too!” One network had a hit show on a certain subject – cat juggling, spoon sculpting, fish dating, whatever – and all the other networks had to have one, too (cf Blue Thunder, Airwolf, Knight Rider, Street Hawk, et al). A related trend was “More please!”, in which a network would try to capitalise on its own ideas. The Six Million Dollar Man on ABC begat The Bionic Woman on ABC (and then NBC), for example.

But that was a spin-off. Sometimes it was just the idea that got revived. To demonstrate, let’s look at two examples of “More please!”: NBC’s 1975 show The Invisible Man, with David McCallum, and its 1976 show Gemini Man, with Ben Murphy, in which two men perform secret agent-style missions thanks to the gift of invisibility.

Here are their weird old title sequences with very 70s theme tunes. Or just the theme tune in The Invisible Man‘s case. Sorry.

Continue reading “Weird old title sequences: The Invisible Man (1975)/Gemini Man (1976)”

What a lovely little show Stingray was. Troy Tempest and the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (WASP) fighting undersea terrors in a submarine called Stingray? Marvel…

What’s that Sooty? We’re not doing that one this week? What are we doing? Oh.

Stingray was a 1986 US TV show starring Nick Mancuso. Because obviously there might be a bit of confusion thanks to Gerry Anderson’s puppet show of the same name, it was retitled This Man is Dangerous in the UK. Whatever title it went by, it was dreadful, even though the late and much missed Stephen J Cannell created it and Mike Post wrote the theme tune. But here are its weird, old, cheesy titles for you to enjoy:

Continue reading “Weird old title sequences: Stingray/This Man is Dangerous (1985-7)”

After last week’s expedition into the merely silly, time to hit a genuine classic of a title sequence with Mission: Impossible. The 60s was a time when everyone went spy-crazy. You could barely switch on the TV at times, it seemed, and not see a spy series of some kind, whether it was Danger Man, The Man From UNCLE, The Champions, Man in a Suitcase, Espionage, The Avengers, The Prisoner, I, Spy, Get Smart, or any of the numerous others. Each of these needed its own niche to survive – hell, look at The Wild, Wild West – and Mission: Impossible, which lasted an incredible seven seasons, found one that worked for it very well: the spy heist.

Here, accompanied by the award winning iconic theme tune by Lalo Schifrin, is Mission: Impossible‘s equally iconic title sequence – the format remained the same every week, but each time the title sequence was adjusted to include the highlights of that episode, so you’d have to guess how everything fit together. Now this is how to rack up tension.

Continue reading “Weird old title sequences: Mission: Impossible (1966-73 + 1988-90)”