Sci-Fi · 1980s
The 1980s account for 17 of the 268 sci-fi shows here, and 20 opening sequences.
ABC and NBC carry four each.
Two of them rebuilt their titles mid-run, Star Trek: The Next Generation most of all with three sequences.
17 shows20 sequences
3 sequences
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Enterprise-D passing the camera at warp while Patrick Stewart reads the mission statement. Stately, slow and completely confident — it takes almost a minute and a half before anything happens, and it never once feels the need to hurry.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Seasons 3–7
2 sequences
Quantum Leap
Narration explaining a premise too complicated to infer, over a theme by Mike Post — the anthology format's problem solved in sixty seconds every week.
- Season 1
- Season 4
1 sequence
War of the Worlds
A sequel to the 1953 film in which the aliens were never defeated, only dormant.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Twilight Zone (1985)
The first revival, with the Grateful Dead re-recording Marius Constant's motif — the middle of three attempts at the same idea, all of which are now in this catalogue.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlien Nation
The film continued as a series, with a buddy-cop format used to work through immigration and prejudice week by week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAmazing Stories
John Williams scoring an animated history of storytelling — cave paintings to campfires to television — for Spielberg's anthology.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMax Headroom
A cyberpunk satire about television, broadcast on television, twenty minutes into the future.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAutoman
A hologram crime-fighter generated by a police clerk's own program, made the year after Tron and looking it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceV
Visitor iconography and a red banner, borrowing its design language from twentieth-century propaganda quite deliberately.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKnightmare
A blindfolded child walked through a bluescreen dungeon by teammates who can see it — the first television format built on a video game's logic.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Ray Bradbury Theater
Bradbury adapting himself, introduced each week from an office full of the objects the stories came from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Tripods
The John Christopher novels adapted at great expense and cancelled two thirds of the way through the story.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaptain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Live action against computer animation, built so that a toy could shoot at the screen.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGalactica 1980
The fleet reaching Earth at last, on a tenth of the original's budget and for ten episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Greatest American Hero
A schoolteacher handed a flying suit by aliens who lost the instruction manual in the first episode and never found it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperboy
Clark Kent at university in Florida, made for syndication while the films were between instalments.
- Season 1
1 sequenceV: The Final Battle
The sequel miniseries to V, three nights long, and the point the story stopped being an allegory and became a war.
- Season 1