All-Time Top 100 TV Themes

WOW! 100 top themes...and all original! Unfortunately, "all original" by TVT standards, can sometimes mean recorded off the TV. I started out hopeful. I thought that maybe they'd actually contacted the studios and replaced a lot of their previously released material (lame covers or bad quality broadcast versions) with "original" source recordings. Aside from a couple of exceptions, the majority was pretty much what you'd expect from TVT. 100 all-time top TV themes, eh? By the looks of it, the top 100 was more a choice of availability than popularity (21 Jump Street?).
Hey TVT, how about spending some time and money and going after the authentic material. How long must we be subjected to yet another release of the "Charlie's Angels" theme with John Forsythe's narration. And what's up with the "Dynasty" theme? What happened to the main horn section? Instead of removing music tracks from a theme, how about removing all those irritating sound effects, like on "Starsky and...Read more

As a fan of TV themes from way back, it's good to hear that in this compilation TVT Records finally went authentic instead of using the many "re-creations" they have issued in the past.

Now, someone needs to introduce those folks to a little bit of technology I like to call an "equalizer". The "classic" themes on this set sound mostly like someone stuck a microphone up to a TV speaker to record them. (Maybe TVT Records found the tape I made of TV themes back in the 60s?) A LOT could have been done to make the songs sound a whole lot better than they do here. And it wouldn't be inauthentic--that shrillness in so many of the old themes was installed to counteract the effect of land line distribution way back when, not because the producers wanted to pierce your ears from the inside.

A couple of inauthentic edits have been applied, too: The Mary Tyler Moore theme has the MTM logo "meow" spliced in, in place of the final note. Cute, but it doesn't work. The...Read more

Right away, this album has a problem, just because of its title. We can sit and argue about what constitutes a "Top 100 TV Theme," but clearly some of these do not belong: For example, "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes" weren't TV themes at all; they were music from theatrically released cartoons. Yes, you heard them on television on local kiddie shows, but they weren't designed for a television program, so technically they aren't really TV themes.

We have to get nit-picky here because all true collectors of this type of material are! And if you have previously purchased the series of "Television's Greatest Hits" discs from TVT, you already have the bulk of what's on this 2 CD set. Many of the tracks were lifted directly from those earlier discs, like "Mary Tyler Moore," which added the MTM cat meow to the end of the theme on that earlier disc and kept it here (also note that the MTM theme is still the "how will you make it on your own" version from season one of the...Read more