Theme Songs

I was watching The Office and Modern Family tonight and I noticed how short the opening theme music was. The Office used to have a longer theme but now its about twenty seconds, Modern Family always begins with a cold opening and then a theme of about ten seconds. It made me think wistfully back to the days when theme music was about a minute long:


but could be much longer...each episode of The Prisoner began with a THREE minute opening title:


and of course music in the 70's was, well, very 1970's:


this was a seventies show I loved set in the crazy future times of 1980: (Nick Drake's sister is one of the girls in the purple wigs)


my all time favourite might be this:


or this:

From Krakow to Krypton

Normally I avoid the books the missus is working on at her desk, not because I'm not interested but because I don't speak Yiddish or Hebrew so I've no idea what they're about. But in the middle of a daring pencil stealing raid on her stuff this morning I noticed a book she was reading called From Krakow to Krypton by Arie Kaplan which is "a history of Jews and comic books." It had lots of pictures and illustrations and was written in a breezy style. This is about my level, I thought, opening up a packet of Hob Nobs and subsequently wasting my entire "writing day" reading it from cover to cover. The book starts well with a forward by the great Harvey Pekar and it continues well, explaining not just the well known Jewish origins of Superman and Batman but also looking at the original funnies, The Spirit, The Shadow, Mad Magazine and of course Marvel Comics' resident creative genius Stan Lee who gave us Spiderman, The Hulk, Silver Surfer, X Men et. al. The book also examines more serious comics, looking at the work of - the bard of Cleveland - Harvey Pekar himself, as well Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman and bringing us all the way up to Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon. This could be the perfect Bar Mitzvah gift for a 13 year old geek or a 40 year old shut in like myself. On his website Arie Kaplan tells us that he works for Mad Magazine (lucky bastard) and he gives us his home phone number, cell phone number and email address, so if you want to talk to someone who has talked to Stan Lee, this is your chance (but at least read the guy's book first).