Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation
The live-action Turtles made by the Power Rangers producers, and the one that added a fifth.
Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation opens with a main title sequence of 45 seconds.
At 45 seconds, it opens well under the 58-second median for sci-fi sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Fox Kids in 1997, when Bobby's World, Animaniacs and Eek! The Cat were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
45sFrom the home-video distributor's own channel rather than a rip.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 1990s
5 sequences
The X-Files
One sequence held untouched for seven years, then rebuilt twice as the cast turned over. The card at the end is the real trick: it reads 'The Truth Is Out There' most weeks, and something else entirely more than twenty times.
- Seasons 1–7
- Season 8
- Season 9
- and 2 more
4 sequences
Stargate SG-1
The gate opening, every week, for ten years — David Arnold's film theme rearranged for television and a sequence that never stopped being about one piece of hardware.
- Season 1
- Season 6
- Season 9
- and 1 more
1 sequenceMighty Morphin Power Rangers
Japanese Super Sentai footage cut against American actors, and the biggest thing on children's television for three years.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Star Trek: Voyager
The most purely beautiful of the Trek openings — Voyager skimming a comet, threading a nebula and sliding past a gas giant while Jerry Goldsmith writes the loneliest theme in the franchise. Nothing about it is in a hurry to get home.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7
5 sequences
Babylon 5
Five seasons, five openings, and each one changes who is allowed to speak. The monologue passes from the station's first commander to his successor to his second-in-command, then splinters across the whole cast, then stops being a monologue at all.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 2 more
2 sequences
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
A title sequence that starts still and learns to move. The station hangs motionless in the early years; by the war it is surrounded by traffic, which is the whole arc of the show in ninety seconds.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7