That distinction was clear from the opening credits, which featured a simple yet catchy, New Jack Swing-style theme performed by Heavy D to keep up with changing musical styles, Heavy worked up a new theme for the third and fourth seasons (below).
It also served as one of the few network outlets for African-American pop culture, both in its sketch comedy targets and its musical guests and hip-hop bumpers (with dance breaks by the show’s “Fly Girls,” including a young Jennifer Lopez). Keenan Ivory Wayans’ sketch comedy show was an early (and big) hit for the Fox network, where it ran for five seasons and helped launch the careers of Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, and “James” Carrey, among others. Cole didn’t create the song specifically for Dawson’s Creek - it was her follow-up single to the top 10 hit “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone” - but its weekly airings on the buzzy show gave the song a huge push on the Billboard charts, where it sat on the Hot 100 for an unusually lengthy 56 weeks.
When Kevin Williamson’s corny yet inexplicably riveting teen soaper was at its zenith, “I Don’t Want to Wait,” the Paula Cole song that opened it, was so ubiquitous that even Creek star Joshua Jackson slammed it with a throwaway joke in the film Urban Legend. Check out the list after the jump, and add your own in the comments. They’re catchy songs, impossible to get out of your brain, like it or not. The rules are the same (the show in question has to have debuted in the decade in question), as is the criteria: these are not necessarily all good songs. As we moved into the 2000s, shows started forgoing the opening credit sequence (lest viewers have the opportunity to switch away), instead crashing right into the show and running credits under the opening scenes.īut in the 1990s, most shows were still bothering to create a theme song whose primary purpose was to lodge itself into your noggin and remind you to tune in again next week. Some folks got worked up about it! (Fine, yes, the exclusion of Knight Rider was a gross oversight.) So, in true ’80s spirit, we took something that did pretty well, and made a sequel - this time selecting from the television shows of the ’90s, a decade that became the last gasp of the opening theme song. Last week, prompted by the death of Andrew Gold (composer of “Thank You For Being a Friend,” aka the theme to The Golden Girls), we put together a list of the most memorable TV theme songs of the ‘80s.
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