Perry Mason (1957)
'Park Avenue Beat' — a jazz chart with a walking bass, over a courtroom drama that ran for nine years on almost nothing else.
Perry Mason (1957) opens with a main title sequence of 42 seconds.
It arrived on CBS in 1957, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
42sThe original opening.
More crime opening titles from the 1950s
1 sequenceThe Untouchables
Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHighway Patrol
Broderick Crawford saying "Ten-four" into a car radio, which entered the language from here.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlfred Hitchcock Presents
Nine strokes of a pen, and then the man himself walks in from the right and stands inside his own outline. A director who had spent thirty years staying behind the camera made his silhouette the most recognisable thing on American television.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequenceDragnet
Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Big Bang Theory
Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Young Sheldon
The Big Bang Theory prequel, narrated by the adult Sheldon it never shows. Its titles are one family portrait in the West Texas hills, reshot every couple of seasons as the children outgrow the last version of it.
- Seasons 1–2
- Seasons 3–4
- Seasons 5–6
- and 1 more