Opening Themes (and why MLP's is great)

I'm still working on my big senior final essay, which is a fancy way of saying I'm still blogging for my handful of followers. Today's topic: Opening themes!

So let's get this out of the way--I'm a huge fan of the opening theme. I know, I know, "they serve no storytelling purpose," or "I don't want to see the same thing every time I watch an episode." I hear you.

But you're wrong.

The opening theme helps to shape the experience of the show. In some cases it's the first thing you see. In others, it follows either a cold open (a one-off sequence unrelated to the episode) or serves as a mini (or actual) act break, usually following some sort of dramatic reveal. In any case it's either the very first thing you experience of a show, or following on something that sums up what either the show itself is (after all, a good cold open is the quintessential idea of a show told in 1 minute--Batman beats up some thugs, one of our ponies does something silly, etc.), or what the episode is going to be like. "Here's my card," says the opening. "Stick around and I'll really show you something." And maybe you don't need that every time you see a show, but you never know what episode is going to be someone's first (and besides which, setting the mood is always good).

Take Sherlock BBC. The jerky cutting around of the visuals gives the audience something like a sense of how Sherlock's mind works--darting around to notice everything, while the tense music sets the tone, and the scientific motif underscores the theme of investigation. Finally the ending shot of some sort of blood test gets at the core of what Sherlock Holmes stories are (mostly) all about--blood (specifically, why is there so much of it outside person A's body).

Plus, and I will own this freely--I adore the play of music and visuals off of each other. I can watch a good piece of editing over and over and never get bored (I can also watch my own editing over and over again and not get [too] bored... but that's got an element of narcissism/perfectionism to it). As much as the human brain loves finding patterns and rhythms and having its emotions stirred by music, when you add visual stimulation too, especially when the two line up it's a whole different ball game again. I mean, ask me how many times I've rewatched the opening to Gravity Falls (which is absolutely fantastic and does everything it needs to). Actually don't I have no idea. I'm not quite compulsive enough to count.

Because the opening theme to a show is something people will see so often, it gets a special importance, too--and while attaching importance to things just for the sake of having something important isn't a great model for how to conduct your life, in art sometimes it can be good. Sometimes it's -very- good, like when you can spend a larger chunk of budget to get a really -amazingly- animated 90 seconds that's going to suck people in and make them want to watch your show (which is always good for business). And when you can invest larger chunks of time and energy into designing a visual/musical sequence that encapsulates what your show is about while being entertaining.

So anyway, that brings us to MLP. I've heard sorta mixed opinions on the opening (and I say this as someone who does not pay attention to the fandom at large very well)--some people dislike how girly it is, some people are fond of it. I can see both sides to this (it IS very girly, and it DOES grow on you), but as someone who's dream-credit is "created by" in the middle of an animated opening, I respect the shit out of those 30 seconds, and here's why:

Look at all the information you know about this show by watching the opening. Let's break it down.

--First few seconds: We see Twilight and Spike in the balloon. This gets us our viewpoint character right from the outset. The music plays the "My Little Pony" theme, which was pretty much a requirement--we are talking about a franchise after all.

--Rainbow Dash flies in, the camera shoots through the clouds, and we see a big dramatic reveal of Ponyville: Main setting established.

--Twilight touches down and hops out of the balloon, starts looking around: She's new in town. Complimenting this is the lyrics about how she's just figuring out friendship, which sets up the fundamental theme of the show.

--Twi sees the rest of the gang, and we hit their introductions. With like, a second or two for each character we get personality outlines for each of them: Dash is all about excitement, Pinkie is all about fun, Rarity is elegance/beauty, Applejack is all about, um... apples? (Well, hey, they can't all be winners), and Fluttershy is kind and also exceedingly timid. The backgrounds for each shot are each character's home (more or less) and show them going about their "usual roles"--Dash is racing off, Pinkie partying, Rarity posing in front of a mirror (I never said it was a nuanced picture of their characters), AJ harvesting apples, and Fluttershy taking care of Angel (who is being a jerk--hey, bonus characterization moment!). The transitions are based on their cutie marks which helps set up the visual motifs that go with each character. Also AJ bucking down apples to an... apple-wipe? to Fluttershy giving Angel an apple is just a cool piece of transitioning.

--Twilight wraps up the "each character gets a line" phase by tying it all together with "and magic makes it all complete" showing the six of them together for the first time. Well, there's the series theme in a nutshell, right?

--But we're still not done. We ALSO get Spike sending a letter to Celestia. And this is key, because not only does that establish that sending messages to the Princess is important (also that there is a Princess in the first place), but it sets up the method of how this is done: Spike burns the letter and the smoke flies off and rematerializes in Celestia's chambers. Now, this isn't a -hard- thing to establish in the show. All you need is "Spike, send this to the Princess," and have him light the letter on fire. But, to get all of that information you'd also need to follow the letter to Celestia, and now you're talking about taking time out of the show, and ideally you'd want a reason to follow the letter beyond to just establish how the letter-sending works. If you recall the first two eps, they're structured partly around having Celestia be absent until the very end. Could you have Spike send the message to the princess and not see what happens, but see the response letter come back? Probably, and I bet people would make sense of it pretty easily, but a) it's helpful to be direct when your target audience is young, and b) it wouldn't be as visual as seeing the Princess receive the letter in the opening. That moment is a great choice because it gives us information that helps to contextualize stuff we're going to see happen a -lot-, and it does so in such a way that you don't even realize you're LEARNING!

For those of you keeping score at home, that's:
1 series theme explained
8 major characters introduced (9 counting angel--and I guess I'm stretching a little to include Spike because his "role" isn't really established by the intro, but he's there a lot and he is following Twi around)
1 main character's situation/arc (for the first season) laid out
1 piece of legacy music referenced
1 setting fully established, 6 or so more hinted at (could probably count the palace as fully set up since we know where it is in relation to Ponyville)
1 important recurring plot element/bookend shown to us in full

That's pretty damn efficient in terms of conveying information. If there's a flaw to be found in the opening, I guess you could say that it plays up the "girly" nature of the show, and it's more interested in being cute than being funny, while the show itself is as much a comedy as it is anything else. That said, as a character-driven comedy I'm comfortable with its intro not being especially silly, and I don't think it could have been both cutesy and funny at the same time, at least not in the way it's trying to be (Plus, the girliness complaint isn't really fair--it is trying to appeal to girls. The fact that it's successful at being true "family" entertainment doesn't mean it shouldn't sell itself to its main target demo). I know Gravity Falls manages something similar, but GF is more gag-based, even though it has great characters. It also has a way smaller main cast to introduce, and its world is inherently funny, whereas MLP's setting is inherently "magical," (which isn't to say it's never funny, but GF spends way more time mocking the town of Gravity Falls than MLP ever does. And GF is like, 1/5th as long at the moment).

So what do you guys think? Got any favorite openings (I know I do but that's practically a separate blog post)? Think MLP's opening is great and/or terrible?

Also, to all you doubters out there--apparently the person who writes the music for the opening of a show generally gets royalties on every. Single. Episode. So yeah openings aren't going away, and they're actually super lucrative for some percentage of the artistic team, and it's always nice when people who make things actually make money at the same time.

Comments

[Psykosis]

I wasn't a huge fan of it at first, but it's grown on me. As for other themes... Ed, Edd n' Eddy comes to mind. It introduces the main characters and establishes their personalities and interactions, set to some really snappy music. Not as much going on as MLP's, but I'm fond of it.

[Fedora Mask]

My personal favorite is the opening to the anime Flag. It's about a civil war in a fictionalized central Asian country, and a Japanese journalist who ends up attached to a unit of UN soldiers (with tanks that turn into giant robots--the robots actually don't add much to the show for once but eh) documenting a series of mostly-covert missions they undertake. It's very simple, but its' one of the most emotional openings I've ever seen--moving and haunting in a way that much fancier openings don't even come close to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS2hdT-Zd8Y

It's also a good example of an opening that's -totally- about theme and tone moreso than character (although you get quite a bit of the main character's life as well). But it does such an amazing job with theme/tone that you don't need a lot of character work in it necessarily (plus the show is going to spend a lot of time on characters, and make them less simple and straightforward than something like MLP would).

[Blueshift]

The opening theme is getting to be a lost art as they get shorter and shorter. We've gone from minute-long pieces to really quick title-card flashes and that's it. Stuff like Lost's "BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA *title flash* is more the norm, presumably because people have lower attention spans. Take the original Thundercats intro vs the new one. The original was frankly, a masterpiece. The new one is uh, well, it's 11 seconds long and tells you literally nothing about the show.

vs

The original He-Man intro was similarly good. In one minute you are told everything you ever needed to know about the show. It's very very new-viewer friendly, which is one of the jobs of the intro. The recent trend towards short, instrumental intros seems to miss that (which is why I like the MLP intro, it's very much a throwback towards these days)

It was so good they copied it exactly for She-Ra!

Then for the 2002 reboot you have the same theme but mixed up in a more 'modern' way, which seems funny the first time, but to me at least, seemed a bit 'I'm better than the old series, with more attitude, sneer sneer'.

The Centurions into is also pretty good as a 'narrative' intro.

On the flipside, there's the 'mood-setting' intro. I think the original Doctor Who one is the best example of that. Television in 1963 and no-one had seen or heard anything like it before. It's iconic.

>Also, to all you doubters out there--apparently the person who writes the music for the opening of a show generally gets royalties on every. Single. Episode.

The flippoint of that is the studio might want to be cheap/not pay out for every episode!

There's a really interesting story regarding this about the original Star Trek. The opening is an instrumental piece, and always was going to be. But Gene Roddenberry used a loophole to write 'lyrics' for the opening. These were never used, but because he wrote the lyrics, he got half the cut of the fee for the opening theme for every episode! The composer was NOT happy, and Gene's response was "Hey, I have to get some money somewhere. I'm sure not gonna get it out of the profits of Star Trek."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_from_Star_Trek#Lyrics

[Fedora Mask]

757405 You raise an interesting point, but I'm not sure I'd call shorter openings a trend per se. Sure you have really short ones like Lost, but lots of shows still follow the 30-second opening formula. To run down a few examples:

Burn Notice's title card is just a little flash that comes at the first act break, but every episode actually opens with Michael's narration explaining the title of the show, his basic situation (covert-ops for hire [to worthy causes] until he can figure out why he's been framed), and introducing the other three major characters.

Psych is an interesting case that has both a shortened and an extended version of the credits--usually if you're watching it on-air you'll only see the short one but sometimes the long one plays. It does a good job of character and tone setup without being overly expository or tell-y, and actually the shortened version is about as good as the long one (just having the "I know, you know" segment onwards), I just like the rest of the song too.

Scrubs does a very short little intro (though I think there's also a long version) that says pretty much all it needs to: it's the daily lives of the staff of a hospital, and they're "not supermen," but ordinary folks stuck in a kind of mundane job that happens to be very important (there's a sense that their roles are somewhat interchangeable, and/or that they're all necessary to the successful operation of the hospital by cutting between each of them doing the same things). It's not as funny as the show and it doesn't privilege JD's point of view the way the show does but it's distinctive and catchy.

I'd even argue that a very brief flash of a title works for Lost in a manner of speaking (having only the vaguest sense of what Lost is like). It's a show about surprise twists and whatnot, so its title is short and sudden, and doesn't bother trying to explain what's going on because you'll need to be paying attention to the show and figuring that out on your own.

Now it could be that hour shows have more time to play with than half-hour, so they're more likely to adopt openings on the order of 30-seconds to a minute rather than super short ones. And it's true that a lot of shows have dispensed with intros: Pushing Daisies has nothing for a while and then a very brief sequence of flowers blooming in the second season (which does set up the art style of the show, but little else), Frasier has a bit of classy, low-key jazz over a minimalist rendition of the Seattle skyline, Better Off Ted just has a logo shaped like a building. But I think it's always a creative choice from the people on staff in those cases: Pushing Daisies has a narrator whose job it is to lead us in to each episode, so it doesn't need as much introduction in the form of an opening (in fact, the narrator would almost be an opening if he said the same things each episode, but he rarely does), and Better Off Ted usually opens with Ted talking to the camera, which lets us set up the basics of the episode. Frasier was probably trying to trade--in part--on the familiarity of the character from Cheers, and also to make sure that "classy" was the predominant feeling, which a longer credit sequence would have lost (I mean, try to picture a credit sequence for Frasier. What would it be about--Frasier and Niles sitting around drinking Sherry? A sequence of the series most slapstick-y moments set to a silly song? The series relies so much on being smart and yet making fun of elitism that I think its tone would be extremely difficult to capture in anything other than the actual dialogue).

That being said, the new Thundercats sequence is pretty bad, but most recent cartoons I've seen retain the 30-second intro, which in many cases is all you need, if you're clever about it. And I agree that the new He-Man intro feels a little too much like its thumbing its nose at the past, though I don't think that was the one that played when I watched Masters on Cartoon Network. I could be wrong though, since I watched like 4 episodes of Masters. It's not that I disagree with the philosophical intent: I think that casting a mocking look back at the old He-Man isn't entirely unjustified (something that I know you disagree with, but I just find 80s He-Man impossible to take seriously, and I think that the decision to do He-Man as a serious action show and not a campy show is a valid one, albeit not the only way you could take things). It's just that he starts to explain things and then gets cut off, and I think that you've got a choice between exposition through dialogue and "showing" how the world works, and that mixing them like that is just abrupt and not very good design. It's not really funny because the gunshots are treated as a serious thing, but it's so jarring that it doesn't quite hook you for action either, because by the time you've caught up to "oh this is serious action now" it's pretty much over.

>The flippoint of that is the studio might want to be cheap/not pay out for every episode!

I hadn't thought of that--and actually forgot about the Star Trek bit--but I'm not sure that it's really a factor. And I don't think it's to do with attention spans either. If there's a reason why intros get truncated, I suspect it's the same reason why Spongebob's end-credits play over the last few seconds of the show now: to squeeze in more time for ads. Because think of it this way: if you don't have the intro (and you're not replacing the time with adspace), then you've got 30-60 seconds more time to fill. That's god-only-knows how much more shooting time in terms of a live-action show, and we all know how expensive animation is. It could even be enough for another scene, which requires a new location or blocking out time on a standard location, etc. So I don't think the royalty that you pay to the songwriters for the intro is a significant drain compared to the price of making that much more show. It may, on the other hand, be significant compared to the money you -could- be making for ads.

But I'm mildly optimistic, in that I think the intro is usually such a clear creative decision, and that series without intros usually are well-suited to not having them, that I suspect it comes down to show-runner's choice to a certain extent.

Besides which, the show-opening won't totally die out, because the Japanese love intros and make the longest ones ever (One Piece and super-long shows like that are up to 2 minutes). Of course, in Japan it's usually not a song written for the show but a popular song that they have some sort of deal to promote, and subsequently a lot of Japanese intros do not marry song and visuals all that well, and may or may not actually set the tone for the series effectively. On the other hand they're often more successfully interesting as pieces of animation in and of themselves, which you tend to only see for action shows in the West (e.g. the original Thundercats opening you linked, or the Batman: TAS opening [yes, I did find a way to work that into this conversation ]).