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“Those Were the Days,” composed by the team of Lee Adams and Charles Strouse (whose credits included the Broadway musicals Bye Bye Birdie and Applause), was the centerpiece of All in the Family’s disarmingly simple opening sequence: series protagonists Archie (Carroll O’Connor) and Edith (Jean Stapleton) Bunker sit at the piano in their Astoria, Queens living room and sing the song of years past, with occasional cutaways to the New York skyline, their neighborhood, and their home.
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Performed by Cyndi Grecco and written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox - who also composed the themes for Happy Days, Angie, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, as well as (no kidding) “Killing Me Softly With His Song” - the opening sequence’s mixture of sitcom hijinks and Milwaukee sight-seeing became a pop culture artifact of its own (witness its parody in Wayne’s World). Okay, so maybe that opening is a little hard to sing along with (“Hasenpfeffer Incorporated”? What the hell are these women saying?), but once that’s over with, “Making Our Dreams Come True” is an irresistibly catchy, and indisputably cheesy (and those often go hand in hand) mini-anthem. Check out what made the cut after the jump: (We’ve all been there.) For the first time, we expanded the list to twelve entries-and even doing that, we had to make painful judgment calls and leave off such classics as Diff’rent Strokes, One Day at a Time, The White Shadow, S.W.A.T., The Electric Company, Happy Days, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Three’s Company, The Love Boat, Fat Albert, Starsky and Hutch, and The Six Million Dollar Man.
1980S TV THEME SONGS HOW TO
Back then they knew how to make a theme song, for goodness’ sake - those songs told stories, set a mood, and were often downright funky (and the best ones did all three).Īgain, our criteria for the list is not necessarily the best show or even the best song, but the ones that stick in your head, every word and/or instrumental break at the ready for mass sing-alongs and quiet moments alone. Having come to the end of an era last week, with the slow crumbling of the TV theme song in the 2000s, we felt the obligation to end this mini-series with a bang by going back to what was surely the golden age of the form - before the ‘90s, before the ‘80s, all the way back to the 1970s.