Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Nine strokes of a pen, and then the man himself walks in from the right and stands inside his own outline. A director who had spent thirty years staying behind the camera made his silhouette the most recognisable thing on American television.
One opening sequence is catalogued for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, covering seasons 1–7.
It arrived on CBS in 1955, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and Truth or Consequences were also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–7
Unchanged for seven seasons. Hitchcock drew the caricature himself, and chose Gounod's 'Funeral March of a Marionette' because of what it had done to him in a film he saw in 1927 — a piece of borrowed music now so welded to his profile that most people who hum it have never heard its title.
More crime opening titles from the 1950s
1 sequencePerry Mason (1957)
'Park Avenue Beat' — a jazz chart with a walking bass, over a courtroom drama that ran for nine years on almost nothing else.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Untouchables
Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHighway Patrol
Broderick Crawford saying "Ten-four" into a car radio, which entered the language from here.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragnet
Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Big Bang Theory
Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Young Sheldon
The Big Bang Theory prequel, narrated by the adult Sheldon it never shows. Its titles are one family portrait in the West Texas hills, reshot every couple of seasons as the children outgrow the last version of it.
- Seasons 1–2
- Seasons 3–4
- Seasons 5–6
- and 1 more