General Hospital

Name: General Hospital
Genre: Drama

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American daytime's longest-running scripted programme still in production.

General Hospital rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 16 and 43, running between 19 and 50 seconds.

It arrived on ABC in 1963, when The Bugs Bunny Show, ABC's Wide World of Sports and American Bandstand were also on the network.

Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; General Hospital did so once.

All 2 opening title sequences

19s

Fan upload. The uploader dates this sequence to 1978 through 1993; counting a season per year from the April 1963 launch, it starts at the sixteenth.

50s

Fan upload dated November 2005; counting a season per year from the April 1963 launch, that is the forty-third.

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.