ALF
A sitcom built around a puppet the cast could not see, worked from a trench cut into the set floor.
ALF rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 3, running between 59 and 62 seconds.
At 62 seconds at its longest, it opens well above the 38-second median for comedy sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 1986, when Truth or Consequences, Another World and Search for Tomorrow were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; ALF did so once.
All 2 opening title sequences
Season 1
62sArchive upload of the first season's credits.
Season 3
59sThe third season's, which is a different sequence rather than a recut of the first.
More comedy opening titles from the 1980s
1 sequence
The Golden Girls
'Thank You for Being a Friend' over four women and a Miami kitchen — a theme so tied to the show that the original songwriter's version is now the obscure one.
- Season 7
1 sequence
Seinfeld
A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Cheers
A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.
- Seasons 1–11
1 sequenceMarried... with Children
Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnly Fools and Horses
A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Roseanne
A family at a kitchen table, laughing at something you cannot hear, rebuilt for every season across twenty years and a thirty-year gap.
- Season 1
- Season 10