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TVTitles

1960s TV opening titles

The 1960s account for 99 of the 2,618 shows here, and 117 opening title sequences.

Comedy leads the decade with 32, then animation with 21.

CBS carries more of them than anyone else, with 25.

Ten rebuilt their titles mid-run, Doctor Who most of all with ten sequences.

Filed by first broadcast. A show that ran for thirty years appears once, under the decade it started in.

Most looked up

Pick a genre above for all 99

Still from the opening titles of Doctor Who10 sequences

Doctor Who

1963–1989BBC OneSci-Fi

Rebuilt for almost every Doctor, and each rebuild invented its own technique — a camera filming its own monitor, light photographed through moving slots, and finally the first computer-generated titles on British television.

  • Seasons 1–3
  • Seasons 4–6
  • Seasons 7–10
  • and 7 more
Still from the opening titles of Sesame Street2 sequences

Sesame Street

1969–PBS / HBOComedy

Children running through a New York street to a song asking how to get there — an opening that has been remade every decade for over fifty years.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 24–25
Still from the opening titles of Coronation Street2 sequences

Coronation Street

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

  • Season 1
  • Season 31
Still from the opening titles of Days of Our Lives1 sequence

Days of Our Lives

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Addams Family1 sequence

The Addams Family

1964–1966ABCComedy

Harpsichord, bass clarinet, and two finger snaps that half a century of television has never managed to shake off. The family assemble for a portrait while Lurch supplies the only three adjectives the song needs.

  • Seasons 1–2
Still from the opening titles of The Brady Bunch1 sequence

The Brady Bunch

1969–1974ABCComedy

A three-by-three grid of faces all looking at each other — a title sequence so structurally famous that the grid alone is the reference.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Flintstones1 sequence

The Flintstones

1960–1966ABCAnimation

The first animated series in American primetime, and the source of a theme that did not arrive until the third season — the first two opened on something else entirely.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Bewitched1 sequence

Bewitched

1964–1972ABCComedy

Animated witches and a swing arrangement — a live-action sitcom that opens as a cartoon, which was the only way to show the magic on a 1964 budget.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Gilligan's Island1 sequence

Gilligan's Island

1964–1967CBSComedy

A theme song that narrates the entire premise, names every castaway, and was rewritten after the first season to stop leaving two of them out.

  • Season 3
Still from the opening titles of Batman2 sequences

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

Cartoon versions of the cast run at the camera and fight their way through the rogues' gallery, because the budget for that in live action did not exist and the animation is funnier anyway. Neal Hefti's twelve-bar riff has an eight-voice chorus whose entire lyric is the word Batman.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
Still from the opening titles of Star Trek2 sequences

Star Trek

1966–1969NBCSci-Fi

The one that set the shape of every space-opera opening since: a ship crossing the frame, a captain narrating a mission statement, and a melody built to be hummed. Alexander Courage wrote it as a fanfare and a lounge tune at the same time.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–3
Still from the opening titles of The Andy Griffith Show1 sequence

The Andy Griffith Show

1960–1968CBSComedy

A father and son walking to a fishing hole while somebody whistles — twenty-three seconds, and one of the most quoted pieces of music in American television.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Beverly Hillbillies1 sequence

The Beverly Hillbillies

1962–1971CBSComedy

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" — a bluegrass number that reached number one on the country chart while the series was running.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Munsters1 sequence

The Munsters

1964–1966CBSComedy

The rival monster sitcom, launched the same year, opening with a surf-rock instrumental and a family filing out of a house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Hogan's Heroes1 sequence

Hogan's Heroes

1965–1971CBSComedy

A prisoner-of-war camp run as a sabotage operation, opened by a march whistled rather than sung.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.1 sequence

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Prisoner1 sequence

The Prisoner

1967–1968ITVSci-Fi

Thunder, a Lotus Seven driven hard past Parliament, a resignation letter slammed onto a desk, and then gas under the door of a man's own flat. Two minutes that explain the entire premise without a narrator, and end with the only line the show ever needed: I am not a number.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Dick Van Dyke Show2 sequences

The Dick Van Dyke Show

1961–1966CBSComedy

A man walking into his own living room and either tripping over the ottoman or stepping neatly around it — two versions shot, and the network alternated them.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
Still from the opening titles of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood1 sequence

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

1968–2001PBSComedy

Thirty-three years of the same arrival: the door, the cardigan, the shoes, the song.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Jetsons1 sequence

The Jetsons

1962–1963ABCAnimation

The same studio's future to answer its own past, with a theme that names the whole family in about fifteen seconds.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Hawaii Five-O1 sequence

Hawaii Five-O

1968–1980CBSCrime

The wave, the zoom onto the hotel balcony, and one of the four or five most recognisable television themes ever recorded.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Thunderbirds1 sequence

Thunderbirds

1965–1966ITVSci-Fi

Five, four, three, two, one — the countdown, the launch bays, and Barry Gray's march. Probably the most quoted title sequence Britain has produced.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Lost in Space1 sequence

Lost in Space

1965–1968CBSSci-Fi

John Williams, decades before anyone was calling him that, writing a fanfare for a family stranded in a jelly-mould spaceship.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of I Dream of Jeannie1 sequence

I Dream of Jeannie

1965–1970NBCComedy

A full animated origin story every week — the bottle, the beach, the astronaut — told in sixty seconds so the episode never has to.

  • Season 1