5 Best ’70s Sitcom Opening Credits Sequences, Ranked – TVLine

Before the streaming era had viewers searching for the on-demand show of their choice whenever they wanted, TV producers had only a few minutes (or less) to grab your attention with a captivating opening credit sequence before you channel-hopped onto the next option. Nowadays, several streaming series use a simple montage of familiar frames from the show as part of their intro. Some modern shows — like the “Matlock” reboot — don’t even bother featuring theme songs anymore.

Sitcoms ruled the 1970s, and TVline has already picked out the best ’70s TV theme songs for you. Some of the decade’s popular shows had masterfully crafted opening credit sequences that combined a catchy theme song with visuals that were informative, entertaining, or both. While there is some overlap with the list above, these opening sequences are memorable for more than just a catchy ditty. A half-century later, these credit sequences have as much of a lasting legacy as the shows themselves.

The theme song for “Laverne & Shirley” is as catchy as they come, and the clips that accompany it are a perfect representation of what the show is about. We see Milwaukee besties Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams) skipping arm-in-arm down a city sidewalk, working together at the Shotz beer bottling plant, and scrambling around their apartment. 

“Laverne & Shirley” was one of several “Happy Days” spin-offs, running for eight seasons and 178 episodes from 1976 through 1983. The title characters dominate the opening sequence, with brief appearances from some background players and the other leads. Alongside Carmine ‘The Big Ragoo’ Ragusa (Eddie Mekka), Laverne and Shirley’s neighbors — Lenny Kosnowski (Michael McKean) and Andrew ‘Squiggy’ Squigman (David Lander) — appear in the intro. Lenny and Squiggy were a big part of the series and the show helped launch long careers for both men. Lander died in 2020, but McKean is still going strong. His turn as Chuck McGill on “Better Call Saul” was one of the best TV performances of 2016, and he earned an Emmy nomination for the role in 2019. 

“Laverne & Shirley” had lots of Gen X kids running to relatives or the dictionary for the definitions of “schlemiel” and “schlimazel.” For many of us, this was our first exposure to Yiddish terms. The opening sequence is light on actual credits (mentioning only Marshall and Williams along with the show’s producers and executive producers), but it gives viewers a well-rounded look at the title characters and the types of day-to-day escapades that drove most of the series. 

Robin Williams’ “Happy Days” appearance was not meant as a backdoor pilot for “Mork & Mindy,” but he proved to be such a hit that Garry Marshall gave Mork from Ork his own series. The spin-off used a few different opening credit sequences throughout its four-season run from 1978 through 1982, but some elements were common to all its versions.

The Boulder setting was an important visual component to the intro, with shots of Mindy’s (Pam Dawber) blue Jeep CJ-5 driving through the Rocky Mountain foothill town. We get a pretty thorough visual introduction to the show’s main characters along with an instrumental theme that morphed from classically-influenced to something with a little more funk come Season 2.

Common throughout were images of Mork’s egg-shaped spacecraft during its journey to Earth, framing the joyful and sometimes frustrating intrusion he makes into Mindy’s life. Mork is heard uttering his catchphrases “Nanu-Nanu” and “Shazbot,” and we see him in his natural sitting-on-his-head position. We also briefly meet other characters, like Mindy’s father Fred (Conrad Janis) and grandmother (Elizabeth Kerr) in the Season 1 opening sequence, but they were replaced by the likes of Remo DaVinci (Jay Thomas) and Nelson Flavor (Jim Staahl) in later versions. This is another opening sequence that gives a fairly comprehensive look at what the show is about and how it tells its story.

“M*A*S*H” has one of the most evocative opening sequences of all time. The theme song is a flute-heavy instrumental rendition of “Suicide Is Painless” — the main theme from the original movie — but the show opted not to include the song’s powerful lyrics, which holds it back from ranking any higher. While the intro evolved over the show’s 11-season run from 1972 through 1983 (mostly due to changes in the cast), it featured consistent images of the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital’s camp from ground level and overhead, helicopters arriving with injured soldiers, and the M*A*S*H medical team attending to the wounded. 

This is yet another opening sequence that reveals pretty much all you need to know about the show while also showing viewers a small sample of some of the series’ most important characters in action. While we don’t get the full effect of the song with poignant and heavy lyrics like “the game of life is hard to play, I’m gonna lose it anyway,” the melancholy instrumental blends perfectly with the desaturated images of the Korean War and the stoic medical team responding to another chaotic day.

Archie (Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) were the only two characters to appear on all 207 episodes of “All in the Family” during its 1971 to ’79 run, and their duet of “Those Were the Days” is as iconic as any performance in TV history. There’s not much visually to this one — it’s just a head-on view of the couple sitting at the piano in their living room — but it’s a perfect introduction to their world and the dynamic between them that made this series such a delightful classic.

“All in the Family” might even have supplanted our No. 1 entry, had it included a more expository look at the show and other important characters, like their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) or her husband Michael “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner). The laser-focus on this one moment between Archie and Edith is exactly what makes the opening so charming. It’s frankly worth watching just to hear Stapleton cackle out the line “and you knew who you were then” with zero apprehension.

Simply writing “It’s the story of a man named Brady” here will likely prompt many readers to carry on with the rest of the theme song from “The Brady Bunch,” but the iconic 3×3 grid of all the Brady family members is just as deeply emblazoned into the memories of those of us who grew up watching this blended family for five seasons from 1969 through 1974.

The opening sequence for “The Brady Bunch” also went through some changes over the years. The six actors who played the Brady children took over singing duties from Seasons 2 through 5 (Season 1 viewers heard the Peppermint Trolley Company). To mark this change, the lyric “that’s the way they became the Brady Bunch” was changed to “that’s the way we became the Brady Bunch.”

MeTV’s YouTube channel has a video that shows all five versions of the opening sequence playing at once, and the most obvious visual changes are in how the children mature throughout the series’ run. It’s yet another opening sequence with a theme song that does a bit of heavy lifting in terms of character introduction, but the intro truly earned its top spot in part due to its cultural staying power. “The Simpsons” even parodied the grid-intro format in Season 7 for one of their most iconic couch gags.