TV Theme Songs that Evoke a Sense of Place: A Top 10 List...(Part 2)

We continue with our top ten list of TV theme songs that evoke a sense of place. Part one can be seen here. I was musing about the songs that have enshrined places to the extent that we are taken there whenever we hear the tune. We started with my top five choices, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum P.I., Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, and Bonanza.

Number 6 on my list will have to be a three-way tie. The locales are not famous geologically, but as geologists like to note, geology is everywhere, including under cities. Especially under cities where geologic hazards strike. So we have Taxi, Cheers, and Hill Street Blues, three shows that were tied to famous urban centers.

First, there is New York, setting for dozens of TV shows, but my favorite theme song comes from Taxi. NYC may be a hive of hyperactivity and paranoia, but the strains of this musical theme make me bliss out. The show was classic too.


The second tie for sixth place goes to Boston's favorite watering place, Cheers. The visuals are as sweet as the song, and I always get irritated when syndicated reruns cut out most of the song to make room for more commercials.



The third tie for sixth place goes to Hill Street Blues. "But wait", you say, "Hill Street Blues? What locale does it belong to?". And your point is well taken. The city is never named. The series was filmed in Los Angeles, with some exterior shots filmed in Chicago. The squad cars look Chicagoan. So we don't know, actually. So Hill Street Blues evokes a place that doesn't exist, but it sure was a hell-hole of a city wherever it was.


This leads me to the final selections: shows that evoke special places, but the places are not where we think they are. Number 7, for instance is M*A*S*H, which famously evoked South Korea, but was generally recognized as a proxy for the Vietnam War, and which was filmed in...Malibu Canyon, California! I still have no real idea what the landscape of Korea, North or South, looks like.

A picture from my recent visit to "Korea"

Number 8 on my list is famous in my mind for having no connection whatsoever with ANY landscape or sense of place: Mission Impossible. It was never clear where the MIF team was based, and their adventures seemed to always take them to small communist or totalitarian states in Eastern Europe or Central America, but their writers must have spent days coming up with imaginary names for each of these little city-states. The opening credits always reflected this ambiguity, since it was different every week, except for the music. That's what I like about the particular clip I found on Youtube; you'll notice that it restarts four or five times, with a different Hollywood set in each.
 

And then there are cost-saving measures related to filming in expensive cities. Number 9 on my list is my favorite cable series of all time, Monk. Adrian Monk is an incredibly obsessive-compulsive former detective for the San Francisco PD who is a genius when it comes to solving mysteries. The opening theme song begins with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands, and continues through other parts of the city. The first season began with a ditty by Jeff Beal. The remaining seven seasons began with Randy Newman's "It's a Jungle Out There", which is a fine piece of work, but I always liked that first tune better.

But somehow, scene by scene, "Monk" looks nothing like the San Francisco I've ever seen. Few of those Victorian houses and unique hills and urban skyline (not to mention the fog). Season one was filmed in Vancouver and Toronto, while others were filmed in Los Angeles, with a few exteriors from San Francisco thrown in here and there.

Another cable show, Psych, is even more egregious. While ostensibly set in Santa Barbara, California, the exterior shots show very little of the town I once lived in. The locations and street names mentioned are right, but somehow, the Santa Barbara of the series is thick with conifers and green meadows, and there is very little Mexican or Spanish-style architecture in evidence. The landscape looks downright...Canadian...it's filmed in Vancouver for the most part.

One other cable show, In Plain Sight, is set in Albuquerque, and even seems to be filmed most of the time in Albuquerque. Even when the characters are supposedly in Stockton, California (you can see the cactus covered hills in the distance!). I can't put the last two shows on my list because the theme songs don't evoke much of anywhere...



The last show on my list is actually one of my favorites of all time, and the music and visuals evoke the landscape most vividly: the little town of Cicely, Alaska. Northern Exposure begins with a moose wandering down the middle of the towns main street, and there is the memorable mural for the Roslyn Cafe. The show that followed included some of the best written dialog in television history. One of my favorite geology-based episodes involved the town enjoying a barbecue of frozen woolly mammoth (Dr. Joel had been trying to get a paleontologist out to the site when the mammoth disappeared).

The funny thing, of course, is that it wasn't filmed in Alaska, it was filmed in the former coal mining town of Roslyn, Washington, on the eastern slopes of the Cascades east of Seattle. The little town is proud of their heritage as a set for the series, and the Roslyn mural and the KBHR radio station are still maintained.

I could not find a Youtube for the Northern Exposure opening credits (UPDATE, see below), but I did find something I missed the first time around: the final five minutes of the 7-season series. It is nice when the characters of a long-running series get to say goodbye, and I had never seen this episode. Even nicer was the song they used, "My Town", by Iris DeMent, one of my favorite singers. I found this scene touching, given my familiarity with each of the characters.


UPDATE: Found a Northern Exposure theme video after all...here it is:



That's my list. Of course it is highly subjective, and I would love to hear some of your favorite choices. While I was working through my choices, I came across a scene (not an opening credit) of one of the more powerful moments I've seen on television. I used to watch "ER", but kind of stopped paying attention after season eight when Dr. Mark Greene passed away.

The scene of his passing (in Hawaii as it happens) included one of the more beautiful pieces of music ever recorded, "Over the Rainbow-What a Wonderful World" sung by Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Give it a look and try not to sniffle just a little...

TV Theme Songs that Evoke a Sense of Place: A Top 10 List...(Part 1)

A song lingered in my head for a few hours the other day, and I found myself wandering like an ethereal spirit someplace different, specifically on a beach in Hawaii. It was quite literally like an out-of-body experience. I could feel the warm air, the bright sun, the light sea breeze...I could even hear the waves crashing, and after a moment I realized that Steve McGarrett just might walk through the door into the computer lab where I was struggling to finish a long program review document.
That's what music can do for you, especially when it is tied to powerful visual images, and to a great extent, youthful memories. It got me thinking about TV theme songs and how they sometimes evoke a sense of place as much as they evoke characters, dramas, and comedies. It didn't take me too long to come up with my personal top 10 themes. It took quite a bit longer to find them all, but here they are:

These are not in any particular order, but the first two probably represent the top of my list. Hawaii Five O has the most unforgettable opening theme of any television show in history. Composed by Morton Stevens and performed by the Ventures, it is one of the few songs that can stick in my head all day and not drive me up the wall. You may or may not know that there is a new Hawaii Five O on CBS right now. It's ok, and I tune in to see the scenery backdrop, but I was upset that they took the opening theme and cut it half! The first night the show was on, I actually went online just to bring up the old theme and play it all the way through.

The show itself hasn't aged so well though. The plots were more sophisticated in my memories than in fact, and the actor's behaviour at a crime scene was appalling. Acting was stiff and wooden; watch an old episode some time and notice that whenever there is an office discussion of the case, everyone but McGarrett stands with their hands firmly at their sides, never moving. Any plot that required hippies or protesters was, um, clumsy and stereotypical. Still it was one of my favorite shows of all time.

I read somewhere that when Hawaii Five-O went off the air in 1979, after twelve seasons, there was an entire institution of studios and film crews left in Hawaii who had nothing to do anymore, so they more or less invented a new series. It was about some happy-go-lucky private investigator who lived in Hawaii who was named, um, something like Remington, or Colt, or Magnum, or something like that.

Oh, it was Magnum, and the opening theme is second on my list! The show, half comedy and half drama is one of my enduring favorites, and now that the DVDs are out, I realize the show has weathered the years quite well. They made great use of the landscape in most episodes, especially since a helicopter flight with the character T.C. was often an important plot point. One got a real sense of the geography of the islands, especially Oahu.

If you are only marginally familiar with the series, you may not know that the whole first season of episodes had a totally different theme song. It wasn't very good at all (check it out below).

Third on the list is one of those songs that will, in fact, drive you nuts in a few minutes if it gets stuck in your head, but it evokes a sense of place as sure as any other song on this list: The Gilligan's Island theme. Although the specific locality of the "island" is never mentioned, it existed on a studio lot in Hollywood. But the pilot for the series was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, and I've been there. I've been to the real Gilligan's Island!

So my question is, instead of trying to get off their island, why didn't they just go up the beach to the housing development?

For your listening pleasure, I found three links, the first of which is the version everyone remembers:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2315010/gilligans_island_opening_theme_in_color/

And then there is a second, earlier version, in which the Professor and Maryanne get no billing. Really! I, like many others, liked Maryanne better than Ginger, and the Professor was one of my life role models. According to Wikipedia, Russell Johnson, the actor who played the professor, insisted that any science statements he made on the show had to be accurate:

http://youtu.be/cfR7qxtgCgY

Trivia question of the day: What was the Professor's name (the character, not the actor)?

I always assumed the castaways were traveling from a Hawaiian port, but listening to the original theme music, one would have to assume they were in the Caribbean:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvslFMAaew

Theme number four evokes a sense of place, but it evokes a place nowhere near Earth...Star Trek.

I appreciate the original theme well enough, but I thought that the theme for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" caught the majesty of space a bit better than the original series. None of the other spinoff series ever came close, but I can listen to the movie soundtracks for hours. For the purists, I found a Youtube of the original series, shown below:

Number five on my list is a theme song that takes me to two places. The first is Lake Tahoe, one of my favorite local destinations, and the other is my youth. My grandparents NEVER missed "Bonanza", and so that music has the ability to turn me into a six-year-old child spending a night at the grandparent's ranch (the two acre ranch was in south Ontario, California; how many southern Californians can remember when Ontario had ranch properties?).

The map that burns up at the start of the theme song is actually oriented with North pointing to the left. Carson City and Virginia City are actually east of Lake Tahoe. Wow, if the family still owned that ranch, they would be billionaires....

That's it for Part one of this exploration of television theme songs that evoke a sense of place. We do have an extra bonus theme song for a place that you all thought didn't really exist at all: Bedrock!

Well, it does exist. I saw it this summer. It's in the extreme western end of Colorado, in the Paradox Valley. I did not see any dinosaurs, or Fred or Wilma. It is conceivable that some dinosaurs would be found nearby, entombed in the Mesozoic rocks that form the local cliffs.

Part 2 will be posted shortly. In the meantime, what shows would you add to this list?