All-Time Top 100 TV Themes [SOUNDTRACK]

Alan Ari Lazar (Composer), Alexander Courage (Composer), Angela Morley (Composer), Armand Steiger (Composer), Arnold Margolin (Composer), Benny Golson (Composer), Bill Conti (Composer), Bruce Broughton (Composer), Carding Cruz (Composer), Charles Fox (Composer), Chris Seefried (Composer), Chuck Barris (Composer), Dave Kahn (Composer), David Lawrence (Composer), David Mook (Composer), Dick DeBenedictis (Composer), Earle Hagen (Composer), Fred Mollin (Composer), Fred Werner (Composer), Garry Schyman (Composer), Tee Vee Toons Presents (Artist)

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 23, 2005)
• Original Release Date: September 17, 1964
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Soundtrack
• Label: Tvt
• ASIN: B000AOENJK
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,358 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #36 in

  Music > Soundtracks > Anime & Video Game Soundtracks

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

America is a huge, diverse country with Yankee home cooking and Tex Mex cuisine. People ski on frozen Vermont mountains and surf the big waves in sun drenched California. One thing that binds it all together is TV. Television is American culture, a common thread that holds it all together on a nightly basis as we assemble around our living rooms to watch our favorite characters and shows.

Twenty years ago, TVT Records was born with its first release, Television's Greatest Hits. Now after having sold millions of its TV theme compilations around the world, America's #1 independent label for the past 4 years running is returning to its roots. In celebration of TVT's 20th Anniversary, it is releasing the ultimate TV collection, All Time Top 100 TV Themes, featuring themes drawn from all the original sources.

Hearing these theme songs consistenly evokes a strong emotional response, pointing to a time when everyone watched the same TV shows again and again. From I Love Lucy and Green Acres to Batman and The Monkees, to Welcome Back Kotter and M*A*S*H to Pee Wee's Playhouse and Twin Peaks to Friends and Six Feet Under, virtually anyone who grew up American watching television is sure to want a nostalgic piece of their shared cultural past.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Another "gem" from TVT, October 12, 2005

By	Nik Ranieri - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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 Hutch", "The A-Team", "Fantasy Island", "MASH" etc. The Batman theme was cool and was original source material. It was nice of Film Score Monthly to do all the leg work since TVT was too lazy to do it for themselves(this version was included on the 1966 Batman movie Soundtrack released a few years ago).
Bottom line, if there are themes on this CD that you must have, then a bad version is better than no version at all. But for serious TV theme collectors, we'll just have to be satisfied with the rare TV soundtrack release from FSM or other such labels and collect the themes one CD at a time.
In response to the other reviewer,...Mr. Lowe, you don't know, Jack! Sound effects and narration on the themes may be fine when you're getting together with your drunken buddies to play "Name That Tune", but serious collectors of television music would prefer CLEAN versions of the themes.

48 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Docked a star for sound quality., August 25, 2005

By	Kimba W. Lion "kimbawlion.com" (the East Coast) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

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 Addams Family theme (which suffers from too much noise reduction, btw) and The Jetsons theme have the beginning and ending themes spliced together.

With the older themes, a lot of times TVT has given us the ending theme only, which is going to sound wrong to a lot of people. You won't hear Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone theme. And I don't know what exactly went wrong with the Flinstones theme, but it ain't right.

Nitpicks? Maybe. But TVT Records wants to splash "All Original" on the cover, so I think it's fair to point out these things.

I won't argue over whether these are truly the 100 greatest TV themes. They definitely got some of the good ones. THE greatest TV theme, in my opinion, isn't here, but you can hear it at my web site (see my sig line, above).

26 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It Will Have To Do, January 3, 2006

By	Jack R. Lowe Jr. (Anywhere USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have some agreements and some disagreements with some of the reviews I've read about this 2 CD set. OK, about John Forsythe's narration on the Charlie's Angel's theme, I don't know what show "you" were watching, but that narration was at the beginning of every episode of Charlie's Angel's I watched. As for the sound effects... Do you want the original themes or not? Those sounds were part of the original theme whether you like them there or not.
As for the sound quality... Does anyone remember what TV sounded like back in the 60's, 70's and early 80's? It was pretty bad. We had a floor model TV with one big speaker. Back then, No one thought about the sound quality of these recordings for future listening. Some of these themes, Like The Adam's Family, will always sound bad. I don't think that there's any way around the fact that some of these TV themes were just not recorded very well.
Maybe there are some old dusty reel to reel master tapes of the original themes buried in some vault some place, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I've actually started making my own TV theme collections thanks to Tevo and my computer. You can rent many TV shows on DVD now. You can get fairly good copies of the original themes from these discs.
TV Land released a very nice CD with TV themes on it. It has some original themes that are kinda hard to fine.
Ober all, this isn't such a bad collection. But, if you're hoping for some digital miracle to make those old themes measure up to todays audio standards, forget it. It's not going to happen.
But I will agree that I am really tired of the rerecorded instrumental TV themes being passed off as original recordings. Believe me, we can tell the difference, and we hate them. As one reviewer said, if you can't get the original recording, don't put it on the CD.