TV Theme Songs of the 80s: The Last Decade of the Full Minute

Before an 80s network drama reached its first scene, it spent close to a minute on its own name. That minute was not filler. It was a piece of built television with a job to do, and the people who filled it were a small working class of composers who wrote to order, at speed, for a fee and a royalty.

The 80s was the last decade of the long television main title. Opening sequences regularly ran about a minute before networks cut them down. The themes were written by working television composers, among them Mike Post and Pete Carpenter on The A-Team, Jan Hammer on Miami Vice, and Shuki Levy and Haim Saban on the syndicated cartoons. Every airing paid the writer a royalty.

What a main title was actually for

The length was the practice, not an indulgence. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2008, Paul Farhi described a full minute of introductory sequence as something shows "regularly did up through the 1980s," and set that against what replaced it: by then, few network shows opened with extended title sequences at all.

The same piece is direct about what those sequences did when they worked. They "introduced characters, established plots, set a program's mood and tone." That is a functional description, not a fond one, and it is the reason a theme was worth a minute of a network's airtime.

It also worked as a household signal, which is the part usually remembered and rarely sourced. Jon Burlingame, identified by the paper as the author of TV's Biggest Hits, a history of theme music, described the theme as a summons. It used to be, he said, "that you'd be in the kitchen getting a sandwich or a soda, and you'd hear that theme. It would remind you that your favorite show is coming on."

That is the whole mechanic. A minute of music at a fixed time, loud enough to carry into the next room, telling a household that the thing it had been waiting for had started.

Who actually wrote them

Television themes in this period came from a small number of professionals working at industrial volume. Mike Post, who wrote or co-wrote a large share of the decade's best known network themes, described the workload of his partnership with Pete Carpenter in his Television Academy Foundation interview, recorded May 25, 2005: "We were doing, at one point we had 10, 11 shows on the air. That's 10, 11 shows a week."

His account of the Hill Street Blues theme is the clearest surviving description of how one of these pieces got commissioned. The archival record puts that show on NBC from January 15, 1981, with Post credited as theme composer. Post says he saw the finished picture before reading anything, sat afterward with the show's co-creator Steven Bochco and the director Gregory Hoblit, and was asked what he thought. Hoblit wanted a garage door and a bombed out street in the snow. Post proposed the opposite.

"You could write something really kind of poignant, but not sloppy, sentimental, just kind of like, you nod your head and go, man, there's going to be somebody born, there's going to be somebody died, there's going to be a whole lot of stuff going to go down in this 42 minutes, but the clock's going to keep ticking, you know."

Bochco told him to try it. What happened next took under an hour. "My house was half a mile from there. Went home, sat down at the piano. I was immediately in E-flat." Post called the producer to say he had something, and by his account Bochco was suspicious of how fast it had arrived, telling him "well, look, I don't want something you pull out of a trunk." The two men drove over, Post played it, and that was the end of it. He remembers the verdict as "do that, exactly that, do that." Post is unsentimental about what he knew at the time: "But I knew it was a pretty good piece of music. And I knew that it would go really good with the film."

Other themes were assignments answered just as briskly. Of The A-Team, which the record puts on NBC from January 23, 1983 with Post and Carpenter credited, Post says the job was obvious from the script: "It's got to be military, because these guys all met."

The rest of the decade's credits are a matter of record rather than memory. Jan Hammer wrote the theme for Miami Vice, which premiered on NBC on September 16, 1984. Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo wrote "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" for Cheers, on NBC from September 30, 1982. And the most quoted case of all is not what it appears to be: the Magnum, P.I. theme most people can hum is not the show's first theme. The record shows the pilot and the next nine regular episodes carried a mid tempo jazz piece by Ian Freebairn-Smith, and that the up tempo Post and Carpenter theme, with Larry Carlton on guitar, took over the opening titles from episode 12.

The 80s cartoon theme songs came from a supplier

The cartoon side of the decade worked differently, and it is the part the record explains best. Themes for the syndicated cartoon strips were not written in house one show at a time. They were bought from a specialist vendor.

Haim Saban, in his Television Academy Foundation interview recorded January 23, 2024, put his company's early work plainly: "Well, we were involved directly and indirectly with Inspector Gadget, He-Man, The Littles." What that involvement was, he stated just as plainly: "We did all the post-production and the music for these."

The arrangement behind it was exclusive. Describing the deal with the animation house DIC, Saban said: "We had an exclusive deal with them where we did all their post-production, all their music, and all their international distribution."

The archival credits match what he says. Inspector Gadget carries Shuki Levy and Haim Saban as its theme composers, and so does He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, whose opening theme is titled "Masters of the Universe" and which ran 130 episodes in first-run syndication from September 26, 1983. A maker's memory in 2024 landing on the same credits the record carries is stronger evidence than either one alone.

The supplier model also explains the peculiar workload these themes carried. A cartoon built for syndication was made to a fixed number, and the record is specific about it: 65 episodes was the magic number required to move a series into weekday syndication, which is why He-Man ran two seasons of exactly 65. A show stripped across the week did not play its theme once. It played it every weekday, in every market that bought it, for as long as the strip ran. Not every cartoon theme came out of that pipeline. DuckTales was written by Mark Mueller and sung by Jeff Pescetto for Disney, and Pee-wee's Playhouse hid a famous singer behind an invented name in its own credits.

Why a theme was worth writing

The economics are the part that never gets explained, and Post explains it himself. Asked directly whether he was paid again when a show repeated, he answered: "Yes, every time any show is played anywhere in the world, a royalty is paid, in my case, through BMI, and it's very lucrative."

Set that against how this television actually circulated. A network drama went to reruns and then to syndication. A syndicated cartoon ran five days a week for as long as stations kept buying it. The theme was the one piece of music guaranteed to play in full on every single airing, in every market, forever. A composer who wrote a minute of music for a show that ran for years had built an annuity, which is why serious professionals took the work and why they took it fast.

What ended it

The minute was not killed by taste. It was sold.

The Los Angeles Times gave two reasons in 2008, and both are commercial. The first is competitive fear. Burlingame told the paper that "Executives at the broadcast networks are operating in a climate of fear," adding: "They're paranoid that if they haven't grabbed you in the first two minutes, you'll go away." The answer to that fear was the cold open, with the action already running before anything identifies the show.

The second reason is arithmetic, and the paper states it in its own voice: a shorter opening means half or more of that minute can be sold as another commercial instead. Airtime that had been spent announcing the program became airtime that could be billed.

The decade was already laughing at the form before it went. It's Garry Shandling's Show, which premiered September 10, 1986, used a theme whose lyrics are about the theme itself, explaining how the song came to be written and asking the listener what they think of it. It was sung by Bill Lynch and credited to composer Joey Carbone. There is a discrepancy worth naming here: the 2008 Los Angeles Times piece calls it a Fox sitcom, while the archival record has it premiering on the pay channel Showtime and being picked up by Fox for reruns only from 1988. The show is the same either way, and the joke is the same: by 1986 a television theme was a convention solid enough to be parodied by stating out loud what it was.

The craft changed as well as the airtime. Asked how television scoring had changed since the 70s, Post said: "Night and day, technically 180 degrees different direction." He described what the old method required: "Because I used to go to the studio 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 times a week, stand in front of an orchestra, conduct. I used to see the film at the studio, get the notes from the music editor, write it from memory."

The honest bottom line

Most of these themes were not art and were never meant to be. They were written to order and at speed, by a handful of professionals carrying ten and eleven shows at a time, to make a program identifiable the moment it started. The cartoon themes were bought rather than commissioned, ordered from a supplier working across several studios at once, and many of them were bolted to shows that existed to sell a toy line. Nobody in the industry defended the long main title once it stopped paying, because it had only ever been there to do a job, and another commercial did that job better for the network. What the arrangement produced by accident is the part that outlived it. A minute of music at a fixed hour, loud enough to reach the kitchen, turned out to be durable engineering, and the plainest evidence is what people do now: the shows have been off the air for decades and the music is still what they go looking for.

Sources

• Mike Post, interviewed by the Television Academy Foundation, May 25, 2005, in Burbank, CA. Parts 3, 4 and 6 of six. Used for the Carpenter partnership workload, the Hill Street Blues commission, The A-Team brief, the royalty answer, and the account of how the work changed since the 70s.
• Haim Saban, interviewed by the Television Academy Foundation, January 23, 2024, in Beverly Hills, CA. Part 1 of two. Used for the Inspector Gadget, He-Man and The Littles music work and the exclusive DIC arrangement.
• "Cue TV theme as it fades into sunset," Paul Farhi, Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2008. Used for the length of the practice through the 1980s, the function of a main title, the move to cold opens, the advertising arithmetic, and the quotations from Jon Burlingame.
• Jon Burlingame, TV's Biggest Hits, first published 1996, cited in the record as the history of television theme music and the source of the quoted remarks above.
• Archival series records for theme and composer credits, premiere dates, networks and episode counts: The A-Team, Magnum, P.I., Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Cheers, Inspector Gadget, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, DuckTales, and It's Garry Shandling's Show.

Part of the 80s kids TV collection on watch culture. See also Taping It Off the TV and the Saturday morning ritual.

Every theme on this page comes with a seat, the room keeps them warm.

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