I’ve been watching a lot of old DVDs and TV shows lately, and one thing that always does my heart good is hearing old theme songs. Not because they’re better or worse necessarily than today’s, but because they’re so long. This is the thing about TV that most tells you how the world has changed since then–not the lack of cursing or sex or violence, but the reminder that once, for all its faults, our world was not yet a place where every spare second of human production was monetized down to the second to squeeze out every possible dime. All those extra verses and super-sized credits sequences–they left millions on the table.
Anyway, because it’s summer, because it’s slow and because I’m nosy, I want to know your favorite TV theme song, any era. Me, I’ll always have a soft spot for Suicide Is Painless, from MASH, because my class sang it in a school concert when I was in fifth grade. If you had a group of ten-year-olds sing a song with “suicide” in the lyrics today, you’d be sued down to your last toenail, but what can I say? It was the ’70s.
Let me hear you sing in the comments. Believe it or not, I’m walking on air!