Crossroads

Name: Crossroads
Genre: Drama

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A Midlands motel, taped so fast that the sets famously wobbled, and watched by fifteen million people anyway.

Crossroads kept one opening title sequence, 32 seconds long, across season 7.

At 32 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.

The opening titles

32s

Fan upload dated 1970; counting a season per year from the November 1964 launch, that is the seventh.

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.