Play with me sesame intro vocals6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Regina Spektor first worked with showrunner Jenji Kohan when she covered the Weeds theme song, “Little Boxes,” during the second season of that show. But Fox and Williams’ hooky theme song that made “love exciting and new” had a lot to do with it. ![]() We thought, ‘Who’s going to watch a series about a cruise ship?’” Decades later, it’s still unclear how a comedy-drama about a cruise ship became an era-defining hit. “We honestly didn’t think it was going to last six weeks. “Charlie Fox gave me this melody, said that it was a new series called The Love Boat, it was about a cruise ship,” lyricist Paul Williams, who wrote the song with composer Fox, told Songfacts in 2007. “The love boat! Soon we’ll be making another run!” sings adult-pop stalwart Jack Jones on this vintage slice of Seventies disco cheese. Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images Yet a convincing argument could be made that its opening credits - a montage of distinctly New York faces and images of strivers and hustlers in action, cut against the addictive beat of Aloe Blacc’s “I Need a Dollar” - are among the greatest ever featured on a channel with a long history of iconic intro sequences. No one would ever attempt to claim that this comedy about two buddies trying to break into the fashion business - an unofficial attempt at an East Coast Entourage - is among the great HBO shows of all time. With lyrics by Raposo, Jon Stone, and Bruce Hart, “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?” conjures up images of smiling kids running down the sidewalk on a sunny day - headed, in the words of Don Draper, to a place where they know they are loved. In addition to writing classic Sesame songs like “Bein’ Green,” “Sing,” and “C Is for Cookie” - that’s good enough for me - Raposo composed the jaunty, instantly recognizable theme song that helped lodge the show in the public consciousness. He wasn’t a big yellow bird or a furry blue monster, but Joe Raposo was as integral to the success of the children’s educational institution Sesame Street as any Muppet. This list - with many of the blurbs owing a debt to the wealth of theme song history in the book TV’s Greatest Hits by Jon Burlingame - is our attempt to explain why we chose these 100 over any or all of your favorites. family sitcoms got the nod and which ones didn’t.) Like any attempt to quantify art, there was ultimately a lot of gut feelings involved: On its own, Theme Song A is an objectively better piece of music than Theme Song B, but Theme Song B is a much more perfect match for its show. (There are still hurt feelings regarding which of ABC’s T.G.I.F. Then we considered two main factors: 1)How great is it as a song? 2)How well does it prepare you for the show that follows, in terms of mood and/or an explanation of the premise? Sometimes, one factor weighed more heavily than the other, and many bitter fights were fought. Apologies to The White Shadow, What’s Happening?, and many more that did not make the final list.) Some were written expressly for that show, while others were pre-existing songs given new life through their association with a particular series. (Honestly, the entire 100 could have been made up of shows from the Seventies. We then pared that down by looking for diversity in terms of style of music, style of show, and era. How did we figure this out, beyond just arguing about it over Slack, Zoom, ham radio, etc?įirst, we assembled a massive list of great songs from throughout the entire long history of TV. So we’ve decided to pick the 100 best theme songs of all time - technically 101, since there are two as inextricably linked as peanut butter and jelly - and attempted to rank them in order of greatness. The best ones put you in the right mindset to watch each episode of your favorite, and can be just as entertaining in their own right as any great joke, monologue, or action sequence. Or maybe we should preemptively accept your thanks?ĭespite periodic attempts to contract or outright eliminate them, theme songs are a crucial part of the TV-watching experience. We apologize in advance for all the TV theme songs we are about to lodge back into your heads.
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