Days of Our Lives

Name: Days of Our Lives
Genre: Drama

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

Days of Our Lives opens with a main title sequence of 31 seconds.

At 31 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.

It arrived on NBC in 1965, when Truth or Consequences, Another World and Search for Tomorrow were also on the network.

The opening titles

31s

Fan upload of the 1965 opening, from the launch year.

1960–ITVDrama

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

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.

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.