Top Cat
Hanna-Barbera doing Sgt. Bilko with alley cats, in the primetime slot the studio kept trying to hold.
Top Cat opens with a main title sequence of 42 seconds.
At 42 seconds, it opens well under the 58-second median for animation sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1961, when The Bugs Bunny Show, ABC's Wide World of Sports and American Bandstand were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
42sPosted by Warner Bros. from the complete-series release.
More animation opening titles from the 1960s
1 sequenceThe Flintstones
The first animated series in American primetime, and the source of a theme that did not arrive until the third season — the first two opened on something else entirely.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Jetsons
The same studio's future to answer its own past, with a theme that names the whole family in about fifteen seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScooby-Doo, Where Are You!
A theme that asks the title as a question, over a van and five characters who have been drawn the same way for fifty-five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpeed Racer
Mach GoGoGo dubbed into English at speed, and the anime that got there before anyone called it that.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWacky Races
Eleven cars introduced one at a time by a narrator, which is a title sequence that is also the entire premise.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Magic Roundabout
A French stop-motion series that Eric Thompson re-narrated in English without translating the scripts, inventing different characters over the same pictures.
- Season 1