Sci-Fi · 1980s

17 shows20 sequences

Star Trek: The Next Generation

1987–1994SyndicationSci-Fi

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

Quantum Leap

1989–1993NBCSci-Fi

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

War of the Worlds

1988–1990SyndicationSci-Fi

A sequel to the 1953 film in which the aliens were never defeated, only dormant.

Season 1

The Twilight Zone (1985)

1985–1989CBSSci-Fi

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

Alien Nation

1989–1990FoxSci-Fi

The film continued as a series, with a buddy-cop format used to work through immigration and prejudice week by week.

Season 1

Amazing Stories

1985–1987NBCSci-Fi

John Williams scoring an animated history of storytelling — cave paintings to campfires to television — for Spielberg's anthology.

Season 1

Max Headroom

1987–1988ABCSci-Fi

A cyberpunk satire about television, broadcast on television, twenty minutes into the future.

Season 1

Automan

1983–1984ABCSci-Fi

A hologram crime-fighter generated by a police clerk's own program, made the year after Tron and looking it.

Season 1

V

1984–1985NBCSci-Fi

Visitor iconography and a red banner, borrowing its design language from twentieth-century propaganda quite deliberately.

Season 1

Knightmare

1987–1994ITVSci-Fi

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

The Ray Bradbury Theater

1985–1992HBO / USA NetworkSci-Fi

Bradbury adapting himself, introduced each week from an office full of the objects the stories came from.

Season 1

The Tripods

1984–1985BBC OneSci-Fi

The John Christopher novels adapted at great expense and cancelled two thirds of the way through the story.

Season 1

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

1987–1988SyndicationSci-Fi

Live action against computer animation, built so that a toy could shoot at the screen.

Season 1

Galactica 1980

1980ABCSci-Fi

The fleet reaching Earth at last, on a tenth of the original's budget and for ten episodes.

Season 1

The Greatest American Hero

1981–1983ABCSci-Fi

A schoolteacher handed a flying suit by aliens who lost the instruction manual in the first episode and never found it.

Season 1

Superboy

1988–1992SyndicationSci-Fi

Clark Kent at university in Florida, made for syndication while the films were between instalments.

Season 1

V: The Final Battle

1984NBCSci-Fi

The sequel miniseries to V, three nights long, and the point the story stopped being an allegory and became a war.

Season 1