The Top Ten TV Theme Songs

Sunday, October 19, 2003

By Barbara Vancheri and Rob Owen, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

When you press play on the topic of TV theme songs, your brain goes into channel-surfing mode. Soon your mind is a jumble of lyrics, skipping from "I'll be there for you" to "Hey, hey, we're the Monkees" to "... all of them had hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one in curls."

Picking the 25 most memorable TV theme songs is a monumental task guaranteed to annoy almost every reader who has a soft spot in his heart for a certain tune or, perhaps, show. Sure, you loved "Here Come the Brides," but does its signature song, "Seattle," hold up? And what about "The Doris Day Show," which recycled the Oscar-winning song "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" for its theme? And was "Green Acres" good or just impossible to shake, like damp toilet paper on your shoes?

Our ground rules were: Hearing a few notes had to instantly bring to mind the series. Even the most musically inept person should be able to hum or whistle a few bars. And the show had to have aired in prime time, which is why there is no nod to "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

Even with two of us, we had to strike some compromises, and that's why "The Partridge Family," "That Girl," "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" and "The Facts of Life" didn't make it. We knew some of your favorites (and ours) would be left off, but that's the peril of a finite list.

Here are our picks. Details about the songs' origins come from the books "TV's Biggest Hits" by Jon Burlingame and "The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows" by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, plus our own research and song-clogged craniums.

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#	TV Show
1.	"The Andy Griffith Show"	Simplicity itself. A whistled theme by Earle Hagen that triggers the image of a sheriff and his red-haired boy (although we see them in black and white) toting fishing poles on a lazy, sunny day. Even Loulou, an 11-year-old African gray parrot, can whistle the song. She's become the focus of a lawsuit filed by a Virginia man whose parrot was accidentally set free and who, he is convinced, landed at a shelter and was adopted by someone else. He wants to question the bird in court and see if she can whistle this happy tune.
2.	"Mission: Impossible"	This Lalo Schifrin theme will not self-destruct from your memory, even decades after hearing it, especially with regular reminders from the big-screen "M:I" movies. The single spent 14 weeks on Billboard's "Hot 100" chart in 1968, and the show spawned two albums in the late 1960s.
3.	"The Addams Family"	The punchy punctuation of snapping fingers helps to make this Vic Mizzy theme distinctive. Children all over 1960s America gathered in front of their sets to sing and snap along. The theme was revived for the movie treatment in the early '90s.
4.	"Hawaii Five-O"	A pizza chain, using this theme's still strong association with Hawaii and those majestic, curling waves, is using a version of this Morton Stevens song to advertise a Hawaiian special. Back in 1969, the Ventures turned the theme into a Top 10 hit and a gold album. Book 'em, Danno.
5.	"Gilligan's Island"	Missed the first season or first run of this show about crazy castaways? Just listen to the Sherwood Schwartz-George Wyle tune, which provides the backstory about that three-hour tour. A three-hour tour, with enough evening gowns for three months.
6.	"Cheers"	This theme, written by Judy Hart Angelo and Gary Portnoy and sung by Portnoy, is as much a part of the series as the communal cry of "Norm!" or Sam's legendary luck with the ladies.
7.	"The Mary Tyler Moore Show"	"Love Is All Around," by singer-songwriter Sonny Curtis, assured us that Mary Richards was gonna make it after all as we watched her pack up her belongings and drive to Minneapolis, where she famously tossed her hat into the air. "Who can turn the world on with her smile?" was a second-season addition.
8.	"All in the Family"	"Those Were the Days," when Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton sang about the way Glenn Miller played, songs that made the hit parade and how "guys like us, we had it made." The tune, by a pair of Broadway songwriters, celebrated a time when "girls were girls and men were men" and LaSalles ran great (there, now you know).
9.	"Friends"	Brace yourself. Between now and May, when NBC closes the Central Perk coffeehouse and sublets Monica and Chandler's palatial apartment, you will be hearing a lot of "I'll Be There for You," by composer Michael Skloff and lyricist Allee Willis and performed by the Rembrandts.
10.	"The Beverly Hillbillies"	Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed, which quickly told us how Buddy Ebsen's character rose from a poor mountaineer to a millionaire living amid movie stars and swimmin' pools. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs sang Paul Henning's "The Ballad of Jed Clampett."