Stargate SG-1
1997–2007ShowtimeSci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi
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.
Stargate SG-1 rebuilt its titles: four distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1, 6, 9 and 10, running between 59 and 62 seconds.
It arrived on Showtime in 1997, when Mystery Science Theater 3000, Twin Peaks and The Outer Limits (1995) were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Stargate SG-1 did so three times.
All 4 opening title sequences
Season 1
62sThe original, built around the gate's chevrons locking and the wormhole forming.
Season 6
59sA mid-run revision, re-cut as the cast and the show's scale changed.
Season 9
62sRebuilt after the near-total cast change — Richard Dean Anderson gone, Ben Browder and Claudia Black arriving from Farscape.
Season 10
61sThe final season's version.
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
1 sequence
Mighty 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
4 sequences
Farscape
A Henson creature workshop pointed at space opera, and an opening that halves in ambition halfway through the run — the narrated version explaining the premise gives way to one that assumes you already know it.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more