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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

The reruns of TNG you're watching and likely the HD remastered copies which had the CGI redone for Blu-ray. So it isn't really 90s effects you're watching.

Furthermore I don't think those scenes you've described are there purely for the sake of impressing the audience. I think they are there to help explain the narrative. Like how in other - eg non sci-fi - shows you'll often get scenes of a car pulling up to a building to help explain that person has just arrived. Or scenes from outside a building to help explain to audiences where the following inside scene is based.

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You're talking about establishing shots. I'm talking about the intros where the ship passes by planets and things with an orchestra booming from the cosmos for what seems like several minutes. It's the exact same thing in every episode and comes after the establishing scenes in the first 1-3 minutes. This is true of every single Star Trek series post-TOS, aside from Enterprise with its cheesy theme and clips from aviation history. (I haven't seen Discovery)

You mean, the opening credits/music? Well yeah, those are the same in every episode, but I assume almost everyone skips those after they've seen it the first few times. Even the Battlestar Galactica reboot had an opening credits sequence which I usually skipped.

You know you're old when you have to explain opening credit sequences to people because everyone younger than you is just used to TV shows jumping right in (often in medias res)

The thing is, I get why opening credit sequences have fallen out of fashion. They were a holdover from the broadcast television era where they served a legitimate purpose, but they are completely unnecessary in an online, on-demand viewing environment. It actually annoys me now to have to sit through a title sequence of any kind, whether it be in a television show or a video game (I am one of those people who will edit a game's config files to get rid of them).

Yeah, just like I totally get why today's computer and video displays are all LCDs.

I still get wistful and sad when I hear someone dimly recall "those TVs with the big things on the back".

Opening sequences weren't required for the old broadcaster either as the had a special pre-show clock that would count down on the tape before the start. I'm fact You sometimes saw this on TV.

Moreover, some older shows didn't have opening credits and a great many that did, often only did so after an acted prelude

Lost was the first big show I can remember that just had a one to two beat opening theme.

It's weird that it took so long. Early films, the Jazz Singer if you go way back, had a fifteen minute overture, reminiscent of the orchestral opening to stage plays while people found their seats.

Movies eventually realized that, artistic merit notwithstanding, that was boring. They first shortened those intros to a card of the main players. Sometime later the guilds required credits include all craftsman, but just stars. A fair and egalitarian move with the unintended consequences of reexpanding credits, making them... Less fun. Studios just moved the credits to the end and began with some establishing scene instead, as a compromise between the contributors and audience.

I guess anyone who mostly watched things after Lost wouldn't expect long tv intros. But then, most streaming services let you skip them, so it shouldn't be a big deal

Murphy Brown was the first show I can recall that dispensed with a theme song entirely and just displayed the credits over the opening scene. I remember thinking it was a revolutionary change (especially for a sitcom) when I first saw it back in the early 1990s.

> Murphy Brown

Great catch. I think Sorkin followed that model in Sports Night, probably trying to emulate MB's feeling of crashing into a busy production room. Can't think of an earlier one though.

I, Claudius also just had a title card, a snake crawling across a mosiac, but it somehow dragged that out for a full thirty seconds according to YouTube, so I'm not sure that really counts.

In film apparently Lucas got in trouble for not crediting the director in his title-only opening for Star Wars, leading him to resign from the guild. The practice became more common though, Clint Eastwood has done title-only openings for everything he's made.

Brief history of the length of opening credits sequences here, with Family Matters as one of the most excessive examples: https://theweek.com/articles/632836/brief-history-tv-shows-o...

Even that misses Murphy Brown though, so now I'm not sure anyone's thoroughly done the research. Where's Abed when you need him?

> Sometime later the guilds required credits include all craftsman, [not] just stars.

Don't forget studio executives, marketers, accountants, IT support staff, and babies born to all of the above.

And today with the rise of the post-credits sequence, it's getting hard for the audience to skip the credits and still see all of the meaty bits of the movie.

I could never skip the ending credits of The Wire. And for some seasons the opening ones too.

If opening credits are done right, they can serve a function, e.g. The Wire.

An example from the cinema world would be Michael Mann's films.

Oh the opening credits? Almost every show - old and new - has them. It's not even something that is specific to Sci-Fi. So I don't really get why you're comparing that to 2001.

Anyhow I do agree they're often boring. The most annoying one is for House of Cards - it goes on forever. Thankfully you can usually fast forward the intros. Which I what I reckon most people do - at least for the longer ones anyway.

>Almost every show - old and new - has them.

They tend to be a lot shorter in newer shows though. Older shows' credit sequence would typically last over a minute, whereas IME they tend to be 30 seconds or less on newer shows, some even less, and some only have a title card sting.

Sometimes that's the case but it varies from show to show. IIRC the House of Cards intro goes on for more than 2 minutes. Game of Thrones isn't exactly quick either. Where as some older shows, eg UK sitcom from the 90s, "Spaced", only lasted a couple of seconds (literally).

If there is any correlation I've observed, it's more to do with the genre of show and it's running time.

GoT intro is actually an establishing shot, showing you which regions are featured in the episode. It varies per episode. It is a bit long, but not compared to the previous generation, and it has a lot of fast moving detail that takes many viewings to see it all. Six Feet Under (2001-2006), also by HBO, intro is over 90seconds and the same every episode, and it's very slow and low-detail.

> GoT intro is actually an establishing shot, showing you which regions are featured in the episode.

Not just that, but the images in each region are subtly altered to reflect the events in the storyline in that region.

That's my point though, the length of intros varies too much from show to show to really make any meaningful correlation based solely on the series age.

Take Boardwalk Empire, another really long intro. Yet Lost, which is an older show, only had a title graphic that lasted a couple of seconds.

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