The Wild Wild West

Name: The Wild Wild West
Genre: Drama

1965–1969CBSDrama

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An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

The Wild Wild West opens with a main title sequence of 51 seconds.

It arrived on CBS in 1965, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.

The opening titles

51s

The first season's opening.

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.