Vote up the theme song facts that have you humming their catchy tune.
TV shows have featured opening (and closing) theme music since the 1940s. Although some are as forgettable as the shows they introduce, many are catchy earworms people remember and randomly whistle or hum decades after a show has gone off the air.
A lot of work goes into making a television series, and much of the creative process revolves around choosing the right music. Choose poorly, and your show may languish in obscurity. Choose something like the Friends theme song, and people will randomly belt out, “I'll be there for you” for the rest of their lives.
Theme music is essential, and because people put so much work into composing, writing, and performing them, there are tons of interesting behind-the-scenes stories about how they were made.
Song: "The Brady Bunch" Performer: Peppermint Trolley Company Composers: Sherwood Schwartz and Frank De Vol
The Brady Bunch permeated popular culture almost as soon as it hit the airwaves in 1969, but not everyone thought it would do well. That included the Peppermint Trolley Company, the band hired to write the unforgettable “Brady Bunch” theme song, so here's a story about a band named… you get the idea.
The band was given only two hours of studio time to put it all together. The demo lacked instrumental backing, requiring additional work. The second limitation on the band was the song's length - it had to be precisely one minute long. The Peppermint Trolley Company's Jimmy Faragher provided the vocals, which were doubled, as his brother and fellow band member Danny Faragher explained:
It was a wrap, gentlemen! We’d held our noses and done what we were supposed to do. We would make union scale as musicians, and Jimmy and I would receive compensation through AFTRA for our vocals. We exited the studio laughing about this corny concept of a show. “It’ll never fly!” I remember saying.
Actors: Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Maureen McCormick, Eve Plumb
Happy Days had several successful spinoffs, and Laverne & Shirley is among the most memorable. The series kicks off with a Cyndi Grecco song called “We're Gonna Make It” (later changed to “Making Our Dreams Come True"), but before that happens, you hear, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!”
If you've never understood what that meant, you're not alone. The hopscotch chant is an unusual way to open a series, but it's also incredibly memorable. Still, that doesn't explain what “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated” means or why it had to be included.
Cindy Williams, who plays Shirley alongside her co-star Penny Marshall's Laverne, explained the line in her memoir, Shirley, I Jest! A Storied Life. In an interview with MLive about the book, Williams was asked about the opening of the show, and she explained how it was created:
That just came about when Garry Marshall [the show's creator and Penny Marshall's brother] directed all the setups for the show's opening credits. We did something like 120 of them in one day - little things inside the brewery and things like that. He took the crew all over LA for that montage, and we didn't quite know what we were doing yet. But we ended up on New York Street on the Paramount lot...
And Garry said, “Penny, teach Cindy what you used to sing on the way to school,” so she did... She'd lock arms with her girlfriends, and they'd sing and count their steps on the way to school. She was trying to teach it to me really fast, saying, “You go up on 'Hossenpfeffer,' and I'll go down, and you go down on 'Incorporated,' and I'll go up,” and I just thought, “I don't get it.” But Garry said, “We've got to go. We're losing light,” so we shot it once or twice, and we left. And we never thought about it again until it showed up in the opening credits.
Actors: Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams, Eddie Mekka, Phil Foster, David L. Lander
“The Addams Family Theme” survived long after the series left the airwaves. It's been referenced and sampled in subsequent productions from the franchise, including the Netflix series Wednesday. The song's use of the harpsichord as a dominating instrument somehow fits the series' theme while remaining a distinctive aspect.
Ted Cassidy, the actor who plays Lurch on the show, provided some of the lyrics, interjecting “neat," “sweet,” and “petite” amidst Vic Mizzy's overdubbed vocals and well-known finger snaps. The snaps are a key aspect of the song, written and arranged by Mizzy, who once joked that he studied “Advanced Finger Snapping” in college and understood the impact the success of “The Addams Family Theme” had on his life. During an interview with CBS' Sunday Morning, Mizzy said:
I sat down; I went "buh-buh-buh-bump (snap-snap), buh-buh-buh-bump. That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps, and you live in Bel-Air.
Actors: Carolyn Jones, John Astin, Jackie Coogan, Ted Cassidy, Blossom Rock
The Cheers theme song, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” perfectly encapsulates the series' theme. The tune was put together by Gary Portnoy, who also provided the vocals by overdubbing his voice six times. He handed ownership of the song over to Paramount to be used for Cheers, and as a result, didn't earn much income from the track… at first.
In an interview with Celebrity Net Worth, Portnoy explained how artists often have to sell the rights to their songs, or nobody would ever hear them. He explained that he received residuals from each playing, but he only truly began making money off it - good money - when iTunes came around in 2003.
Because he owned the rights to a specific version he recorded, he uploaded it to iTunes and began selling the track. The internet offered new revenue streams like iTunes, and Portnoy has benefited ever since. Portnoy eventually gained ownership of a master recording, which he discussed with American Songwriter:
Everybody’s got their war stories. But before [Applause Records closed down], they gave Judy and me the ownership of the master recording. So thankfully, in this digital age, where there’s all this renewed activity and discovery, we actually own the master of the 45. If somebody wants to use that master, they have to contact us for the license. If they want to use the recording from the television show, they have to go to CBS, who owns it now. It wasn’t nice, at the time, to have a song all over the radio and charting and not get paid when it sold. But it all worked out in the end.
Song: "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" Performer: Larry Marks, and later George A. Robertson Jr. Composers: David Mook and Ben Raleigh
Scooby-Doo and his human teen detective pals have starred in many television shows and films, but it all began in 1969 with Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The Hanna-Barbera cartoon entertained the masses and continued doing so long after it went off the air. As new versions came and went, few could forget the show's theme song, also titled “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!”
If you've heard the song, you likely think several people sang it; after all, there are feminine and masculine voices throughout. While you'd be forgiven for believing that, it isn't accurate. The song was sung by Larry Marks, who was initially hired to do background singing before moving into theme song work, and when Hanna-Barbera came calling, Marks was tapped in part, he said, because of his vocal range:
I had a three-and-a-half octave range, so I could do girls’ parts. I was handy to have around the studio. When the theme was written for Scooby-Doo, my boss said I want you to do the vocals.
Marks knew almost nothing about the series. He'd been told a basic premise but never saw or heard anything about the characters. They cut the tracks on a Wednesday, and the series premiered that Saturday, which wasn't the typical flow for Marks, but he and his crew managed it well enough, and his voice - or voices - became an indelible part of popular culture.
Song: "I'll Be There for You" Performer: The Rembrandts Composers: Allee Willis, Danny Wilde, David Crane, Marta Fran Kauffman, Michael Jay Skloff, Phil Solem
The Rembrandts' “I'll Be There for You” is one of the most recognized theme songs of the 1990s, thanks to a little show you might have heard about called Friends. The song opens every episode of the series, and any fan can likely chant it word for word. You might think the recognition only served to improve The Rembrandts' standing, but the opposite is true. The song's popularity is what ultimately pushed The Rembrandts to break up.
According to the band's singer, Danny Wilde, fans either loved or hated them for contributing “I'll Be There for You” to Friends - they were accused of abandoning their alternative roots, selling out, and going mainstream. The Rembrandts went from playing small, underground venues to selling out stadiums overnight, and people stopped taking them seriously. Wilde told The Independentthat although at times he's proud of the song, it's also been an “albatross”:
You could say it became something of a curse, yes. We were tired of it being the only thing we were known for, and we were tired of being on the road. After the third album came out and did so well, we toured for three years. We weren't writing any new songs, and we weren't spending any time in the studio. The whole thing became a grind. There was no outright animosity between us, but we needed a break from each other.
Actors: Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry
