Mission: Impossible
A lit fuse crossing the screen while clips from the episode ahead flash past it — a title sequence recut every week from the show it introduces.
Mission: Impossible kept one opening title sequence, 50 seconds long, across season 2.
It arrived on CBS in 1966, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 2
50sThe second season's opening at broadcast resolution, with Peter Graves' starring card on it — he joined in that season, which places the clip. The copy rejected before was a 4K upscale.
More drama opening titles from the 1960s
2 sequences
Coronation Street
The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.
- Season 1
- Season 31
1 sequenceDays of Our Lives
"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wild Wild West
An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Virginian
The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.
- Season 1
2 sequences
One Life to Live
Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.
- Season 21
- Season 44