NBC Nightly News
1970–NBCDocumentary
Fourteen seconds of brass and a rotating globe, which is what a network evening bulletin has been reduced to.
NBC Nightly News kept one opening title sequence, 14 seconds long, across season 47.
At 14 seconds, it opens well under the 37-second median for documentary sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 1970, when Truth or Consequences, Another World and Search for Tomorrow were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 47
14sFan upload dated 10 October 2016; counting a season per year from the 1970 launch, that is the forty-seventh.
More documentary opening titles from the 1970s
2 sequencesFamily Feud
Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.
- Season 1
- Season 35
2 sequencesThe Price Is Right
"Come on down" — the longest-running game show in American television, opening the same way for fifty years.
- Season 1
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1 sequenceMonday Night Football
The programme that moved American football into primetime, and gave it a fanfare to arrive on.
- Season 2
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.
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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 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