My Life in TV Theme Songs

One of my proudest moments last year came in December, when I finally got to share one of my weirdest skills with the world at large: my perfect recitation of the song “Yakko’s World,” which I’ve had memorized since 1995 and which I can perform at the drop of a hat.

(Seriously, call me on this brag! I can sing it to you whenever you want!)

“Yakko’s World” isn’t a TV theme song, but it’s from Animaniacs, a show that also has a winningly memorizable theme. And calling upon this memory from the depths of my long-term brain storage made me realize how many of these opening show sequences have seeped into my DNA over the decades.

It’s probably one of the biggest signifiers of my Xennial existence that I can trace my life through TV theme songs. So, herewith, I present: an incomplete but annotated syllabus of Casey’s formation as a human being, as told through the TV shows that shaped me. Get ready for soooo many earworms!

The ‘80s

The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock

I’m pretty sure I was born with a deep and forever love for all things Muppets. Both The Muppet Show and Sesame Street premiered before I even entered this life, so I can’t even tell you my first impressions of them — only that Kermit and Fozzie and Beaker and Statler and Waldorf and the Electric Mayhem (and Big Bird and Oscar and The Count) were just always there in my consciousness, funny and charming and like my best furry friends from the get-go.

But I distinctly remember the thrill of Fraggle Rock premiering and the anticipation of having a new episode to watch every week, with the classic HBO bumper serving as a lead-in. Yes, it’s true: Fraggle Rock was an HBO show long before it was co-opted by Apple TV.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

In addition to the educational trifecta of Sesame Street / The Electric Company / 3-2-1 Contact, my typical kiddo afternoon of TV-watching wouldn’t be complete without a soothing half-hour of Fred Rogers.

Fun fact: Because the show was filmed and produced in Pittsburgh (WQED represent!), I always thought that Mister Rogers was basically around to talk to me personally. He was, like, the kindly neighbor down the street for real! It wasn’t until I went to college that I had the embarrassing epiphany that THE REST OF THE WORLD knew and loved him too.

Inspector Gadget

I started watching Inspector Gadget before I knew of Get Smart, which later came into my life via Nick at Nite. So originally I didn’t realize this was a play on Don Adams’ earlier bumbling detective role. I’m including the end credits here because it has the best line in the series: “I’ll get you next time, Gadget — NEXT TIME!” “Mrrrrowwww!”

Pee-wee’s Playhouse

I’ve already gone on at length about the outsize influence of Pee-wee Herman and the rest of the Playhouse gang on my cultural development, but in terms of iconic TV theme songs and opening sequences, this has to be the pinnacle. So here it is: an excuse to watch it one more time.

Special shout-out to Nickelodeon

In case I haven’t made this clear already, TV has been my babysitter for my entire life. So along with theme songs, commercials and bumpers for the channels I watched most often are also on command in my head. This Nickelodeon bumper compilation really is something for those of you who remember:

And if you too watched Christine Taylor on Hey Dude, I appreciate your excellent taste.

The ‘90s

Duck Tales and Tiny Toon Adventures

Just because I went from kid to tween to teenager didn’t mean I had to stop watching cartoons! Every day after the harrowing battlefield of middle school, I’d run home and turn on the block of cartoon programming that included Duck Tales and Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, then flip over to CBS for Tiny Toon Adventures.

And I have Tiny Toons to thank for introducing me to the wonder of They Might Be Giants via the 1991 “Tiny Toon Music Television” episode that featured animated videos for “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and “Particle Man.”¹

My So-Called Life

Go now, go! Someday I’ll do a fully thought-out post on the immense influence of My So-Called Life on my so-called life (you knew I was going to do it), but for now, enjoy the most perfect theme song from W.G. Snuffy Walden from the most perfect show to ever exist for 18 perfect episodes. (There were 19 episodes total and one of them was not my favorite… sorry, Juliana Hatfield.)

Mr. Snuffy Walden also scored Felicity, which we’ll get to…

The X-Files

OK, yes, the graphics are goofy (”Paranormal Activity,” lol) and this feels like such an outlier compared to everything else on this list, but I cannot overstate how much this show meant to me.

Other high school kids were out being social and going to the mall or the movies or the football game on Friday nights… I was in my basement with my sibling watching Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, and I regret nothing.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Because I went to school in the backwoods of Pennsylvania in the late ‘90s, we didn’t have amenities like air conditioning or elevators in the dorms or any kind of TV hookup in each room. When I wasn’t obsessively rewatching movies on VHS, I was experiencing communal TV viewing with my sorority sisters on our suite television (Days of Our Lives with Charlene at 1:00 pm on weekdays, and of course Friends every Thursday.) So good luck convincing anyone to watch anything off-kilter or less popular.²

But somehow I managed to get an antenna to pick up a few channels in our tenement of an off-campus house my senior year, so I finally got to see what Buffy was all about. And immediately become obsessed with the Nerf Herder theme song.

The ‘00s

Felicity

Felicity might have made seismic cultural waves when she cut her hair in season two, but for me, the big shift was when J.J. Abrams decided to switch up the theme song in season three! And “New Version of You” will forever remind me of being young and exhilarated and questioning and hoping and basically 22 (ok, I was 24) in New York circa 2001-2002.

Gilmore Girls

Again, I’ve already told you what this show and this theme song mean to me (it’s actually what inspired this entire post), but here it is once more: your portal to the kooky but comforting world of Stars Hollow.

Ed

Another show that changed theme songs halfway through its run, but I think we all can agree that the original Foo Fighters version was the far superior one. And because Ed is one of the pop culture things that brought Dan and I together, I’ll always watch this opening with a tear in my eye for the gorgeous shots of Westfield, New Jersey.

And then… what happened to TV theme songs?

Well, we all know what happened. TiVo and DVRs replaced the physical act of taping shows to VHS, then streaming gave us the Skip button and made it frictionless to move past the theme songs.

And, in my opinion, all the fancy CGI opening sequences in the HBO universe are more boring than anything from the pre-digital days. (I’m looking at you, The Crown and The Gilded Age.)

Nothing sticks in my head anymore and frankly, nothing has been really earworm-y since Parks and Recreation, with two major exceptions:

Adventure Time

OMG, it’s another absurdist cartoon that has stolen my heart! Shocking, I know.

Downton Abbey

Truth: the reason I love this so much is because it’s the perfect show to have on repeat in the middle of the night as my sleep show. The music and the British accents are just so soothing, and no one really yells on the show, so it is a perfect lull.

One last honorable mention:

RuPaul’s Drag Race gets an award for having some sort of magnetic vibrational beat that my cat Lenny recognizes and loves. I swear to you that he knows when I’m watching Drag Race and the Eras Tour by the music vibrations, and will sit on the couch with me and watch them every single time.

1. Later in life, TMBG would pair up with another one of my animation obsessions, Homestar Runner, in the video for “Experimental Film” and the Strong Bad email song “Different Town.”
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2. Actually, I found a group of like-minded X-Files fans at the Phi Psi fraternity, so I’d trek up there every Sunday night to watch with Matt and Drew and a few other guys. ↩︎