FOUR DECADES OF TV THEMES

How TV theme songs have changed over the decades and what went into writing these unforgettable tunes

The '70s
Classic TV theme: Happy Days
Written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel

Goodbye grey sky, hello blue.
There's nothing can hold me when I hold you.
Back when we had to leave the couch to change the channel, the opening sequence of a show was its audition for the next 30 minutes of our attention. Should we spend some time with Richie and The Fonz, or flip over to the Tony Orlando & Dawn Rainbow Hour? The song could make all the difference, and doing it right was an art form.

Happy Days ran from 1974-1984, but for the first 2 seasons, the era-appropriate "Rock Around The Clock" was the opening theme, while "Happy Days," which Charles Fox wrote with lyricist Norman Gimbel, played as the closing theme. In season 3, "Happy Days" took over as the open.

Charles Fox, who wrote the music for at least 100 classic and not-so-classic (The Joe Namath Hour) TV shows, studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who also taught composition to Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Philip Glass. He told us:

You always want to capture what you think is the essence of the show and you want to make something that's bright and interesting and attractive. So if someone's in the other room doing something and hears the theme, they say, "Oh, I know that show, I like that show," and they come running in. And the other thing is you want to make it so that you can have elements from the theme that you can score within the body of the show, and then hopefully someday it could go on and be a hit record, also, and sound fresh all the time.
Think back to Happy Days: When you hear the theme and get the thumbs up from Fonzie, it feels so good, it can't be wrong. It was so good that the theme was made into a full-length song, charting at #5 in the US and even cracking the UK Top 40.


Did You Know?

Quincy Jones, who also studied with Nadia Boulanger, wrote the theme song to Sanford and Son, which is called "The Streetbeater."And did we mention the closing theme? In what would be seen as a trivial waste of show content these days, each episode ended with a reprise of the theme song while credits displayed over still shots of the jukebox. This was common practice back then.

Gimbel and Fox also wrote the theme to the Happy Days spin-off Laverne & Shirley, called "Making Our Dreams Come True." They wrote the song as "Hoping Our Dreams Will Come True," but changed it when the producers told them that these independent women don't "Hope," they go out and make things happen. Additional credits for the songwriters include "Killing Me Softly With His Song" and "I Got A Name."

Other famous theme songs from the '70s:
•"Suicide Is Painless" from M*A*S*H - The complete song, with lyrics, appears in the 1970 movie that gave rise to the show.


•"Movin' On Up" from The Jeffersons - This was sung by Ja'net DuBois, who played Willona Woods on Good Times.


•"Welcome Back" from Welcome Back, Kotter - John Sebastian's song about returning to where you came from caught on and became a #1 hit.