Monday Night Football
1970–ABCDocumentary
The programme that moved American football into primetime, and gave it a fanfare to arrive on.
Monday Night Football kept one opening title sequence, 51 seconds long, across season 2.
At 51 seconds, it opens well above the 37-second median for documentary sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1970, when One Life to Live, All My Children and The Bugs Bunny Show were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 2
51sFan upload of the 1971 open — the second season, counted from the 1970 launch.
More documentary opening titles from the 1970s
2 sequences
Family Feud
Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.
- Season 1
- Season 35
2 sequences
The Price Is Right
"Come on down" — the longest-running game show in American television, opening the same way for fifty years.
- Season 1
- Season 36
1 sequenceSoul Train
An animated locomotive pulling into a city drawn in airbrush — the longest-running first-run syndicated show in American history opens like a record sleeve.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe World at War
Thames Television's twenty-six part history of the Second World War, still the benchmark for the form.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNBC Nightly News
Fourteen seconds of brass and a rotating globe, which is what a network evening bulletin has been reduced to.
- Season 47
1 sequenceThe Old Grey Whistle Test
The serious music programme to Top of the Pops' singles chart, with a harmonica riff and a star-kicker cartoon.
- Season 1