Babylon 5
1993–1998SyndicationTNTSci-Fi
Five seasons, five openings, and each one changes who is allowed to speak. The monologue passes from the station's first commander to his successor to his second-in-command, then splinters across the whole cast, then stops being a monologue at all.
Babylon 5 rebuilt its titles: five distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1–5.
It arrived on Syndication in 1993, when Romper Room, Soul Train and Hee Haw were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Babylon 5 did so four times.
All 5 opening title sequences
Season 1
Commander Sinclair speaks it: the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth–Minbari war. The station is introduced as a place rather than as a cast, the camera holding on it while the narration explains what it is for.
Season 2
Sinclair is gone and Captain Sheridan inherits both the station and the narration. The words are rewritten around a war that has not started yet, and Christopher Franke rescores the theme rather than reusing it.
Season 3
Ivanova narrates, and the monologue concedes: the project was the last, best hope for peace, and it failed. What replaces that hope — the last, best hope for victory — is the line the series turns on.
Season 4
No narrator at all. The monologue is broken into single lines and handed round the cast, so the year is described by the people living through it instead of summarised over them.
Season 5
Not a monologue any more. The titles become a montage of voices and moments from the four years behind them, which makes the opening and the previously-on the same thing.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 1990s
5 sequences
The X-Files
One sequence held untouched for seven years, then rebuilt twice as the cast turned over. The card at the end is the real trick: it reads 'The Truth Is Out There' most weeks, and something else entirely more than twenty times.
- Seasons 1–7
- Season 8
- Season 9
- and 2 more
4 sequences
Stargate SG-1
The gate opening, every week, for ten years — David Arnold's film theme rearranged for television and a sequence that never stopped being about one piece of hardware.
- Season 1
- Season 6
- Season 9
- and 1 more
1 sequence
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Japanese Super Sentai footage cut against American actors, and the biggest thing on children's television for three years.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Star Trek: Voyager
The most purely beautiful of the Trek openings — Voyager skimming a comet, threading a nebula and sliding past a gas giant while Jerry Goldsmith writes the loneliest theme in the franchise. Nothing about it is in a hurry to get home.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7
2 sequences
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
A title sequence that starts still and learns to move. The station hangs motionless in the early years; by the war it is surrounded by traffic, which is the whole arc of the show in ninety seconds.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7
4 sequences
Farscape
A Henson creature workshop pointed at space opera, and an opening that halves in ambition halfway through the run — the narrated version explaining the premise gives way to one that assumes you already know it.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more