how rude/did i do that/don't be ridiculous
Since the inception of television, the beast known as the "theme song" has changed quite a bit. In the 50s and 60s, when this whole "TV" thing was new and people still assumed it was powered by ghosts, it was not uncommon during the opening song of a program to explain to the viewer that the horse was going to talk, why the car had an old woman's soul, and just how a divorcee and a widow with tons of baggage (six children) were able to form a bunch. As years passed and viewers grew more familiar with TV, the premise explaining theme song (PETS) soon dropped out in favor of the shorter, instrumental theme song. While this change made watching television shows a little less insulting, in many cases a PETS was necessary. I mean, in the opening of Knight Rider they don't even mention that Michael Knight has a talking car!

Television producers recognized this problem, and they settled on a happy medium between the PETS and the instrumental theme song: the tone establishing theme song (TETS)! Instead of explaining to the viewer the premise of the show, they would write a cheesy opening song that would try to set up the tone for a show (but would ultimately fail). Two musicians, Jesse Frederick and Bennett Salvay, used ABC's TGIF as their stomping ground, and produced some of the most cavity-inducing opening songs known to man. Today, we will examine some of these.

Full House

Full House was a staple of TGIF's gauntlet of bad sitcoms, and it had an equally bad theme song. Let's take a look at some of it:


Everywhere you look, everywhere you go.
There's a face
Of somebody who needs you.
Eveywhere you look,
When you're lost out there and you're all alone,
A light is waiting to carry you home,
Everywhere you look.

While one might think this song symbolized the togetherness of the family on Full House, in reality it's a dark and disturbing protrayal of father Danny Tanner, his life as a doormat and his subsequent co-dependency. More like, "Everywhere you look, there's a bunch of goddamn moochers!" Actually, since the show took place in San Francisco, it might have been for apt for the lyrics to be, "Everywhere you look, there sure are a lot of homosexuals." I'm not sure if this next point is going to be as trite as an "everyone on Scooby-Doo was on drugs!" observation, but to this day I feel that Full House was the first alternative lifestyle sitcom on family TV. Let's look at the facts: we have a neat and tidy male widow who invites his best friend (which he makes his children call "Uncle") to live with him, along with his wife's attractive brother. Maybe all of the freaky nightly trysts they were having is why Danny and Joey never got married throughout the course of the show, and why Uncle Jesse moved back in after he did find a wife. The subtext is clearly text at this point.

Family Matters

Family Matters, which introduced America to the concept of the black nerd, was not always about Urkel. It started as a heartwarming story about an African-American family living in Chicago... before the writers added time machines and robots. Let's take a look at the theme:

It's a rare condition, this day & age
To read any good news on the newspaper page
But the loving tradition & the grand design
Some people say is even harder to find

Well then there must be some magic glue
Inside these gentle walls
Cause all I see is a tower of dreams
Real love bursting out of every seam

As with the Full House theme song, which demands to know what has become of the milkman, the paperboy, and evening TV, Family Matters paints a dark, dystopian view of the world, or perhaps just a dystopian view of newspapers. Yet somehow in this terrible futurescape, one family is able to build a tower using glue that is probably a naturally occuring substance in their body (I'm just going on what the theme song is telling me here). Since god loves to see humans suffer, he sends Urkel down as a dark angel to dismantle the Winslow's Tower of Dreams, piece by gluey piece. Just look what happened to the Tower of Babel! And if Urkel can rip off The Nutty Professor and create a breakdancing robot while he's on the warpath, well, more power to him. Also, I believe that he killed the youngest Winslow daughter, and used her hollowed-out body to hold jelly beans, because she kind of disappeared after a few years.

Perfect Strangers

Perhaps one of the greatest theme songs of all time, the cheese of which is so thick it should be a menu item at Hardees:

Sometimes the world looks perfect
Nothin' to rearrange
Sometimes you just
Get a feelin' like you need some kind of change
Standin' tall
On the wings of my dream
Rise and fall
On the wings of my dream
Rain and thunder, the wind and haze
I'm bound for better days
It's my life
It's my dream
Nothin's gonna stop me now.

Before I talk about the thematic elements of this song, I'd just like to say my favorite thing to do is to stand on the roof of my house, the wind whipping through my hair as the "staaannnding tallll" part of the song plays and a camera films a perfect 360 degree crane shot of me and I am filled with wonder and confidence. Goosebumps. The premise for Perfect Strangers is "a dick lives with his wacky Greek immigrant cousin," but you'd never guess it from listening to the opening song. Based on "Standing Tall," it sounds like Larry and Balki are inner-city social workers, or perhaps superheros that are susceptible to poor weather conditions. Once again, Frederick and Salvay give us yet another disingenuous opening song.

Well I hope you were able to learn a little, much like I learned that the time I spent with these shows as a child I can never get back. I could have been doing something much more constructive... like sleeping or developing a late-onset case of SIDS.