It’s What’s Up Front That Counts

For at least the last couple of weeks, novelist-screenwriter Lee Goldberg has been featuring the opening credits from vintage TV series on his blog, A Writer’s Life. First up was the main title from the 1974 British action-adventure series The Zoo Gang, boasting an instrumental theme by none other than Paul McCartney. (See the video here.) Then, earlier this week, came the opener from Petrocelli, a much better than average, 1974-1976 legal drama that starred Barry Newman as a Harvard-matriculated attorney who abandoned “the big city” in order to practice law in a tiny Southwestern town. Petrocelli’s theme music was composed by Argentinean pianist Lalo Schifrin, who also created the themes for Mission: Impossible, Mannix, and Starsky & Hutch. (See the Petrocelli video here.)

I don’t want to pilfer Goldberg’s good idea. But he has inspired me to share my own favorite opener, this one from the third season of It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), the ABC-TV series starring Robert Wagner as a suave professional burglar named Alexander Mundy, who’s released from prison on one remarkable condition: that he employ his unique skills on behalf of a super-secret U.S. government spy agency, the SIA. The Thief theme is credited to renowned jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin. They just don’t make series openers like this one anymore. The intro begins here at the 4:56 mark:



If, as threatened, actor Will Smith goes ahead with a theatrical remake of It Takes a Thief, I can only hope that he’ll pick up the still-fresh, mood-setting Grusin theme.

While we’re on the subject of memorable opening credits from TV crime series, I can’t fail to mention a few other favorites, all of which are available (at least for now) on YouTube: The Rockford Files (theme by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter), Hawaii Five-0 (theme by Morton Stevens), Miami Vice (theme by Jan Hammer), Banacek (theme composed by Billy Goldenberg), Simon & Simon (theme by Mike Towers), and Ironside (theme by Quincy Jones).

Ain’t nostalgia grand?

LISTEN UP, FOLKS: Although (regrettably) it doesn’t offer accompanying video clips, the Classic Television Web site does make available theme-music selections from scores of older American TV series, including Adam-12, Barnaby Jones, Jake and the Fatman, Dragnet, Police Woman, and Spenser: For Hire.