R.I.P. Guy Who Wrote Wonderful Theme Songs for Television Shows I Liked

Vic Mizzy passed away yesterday and TV Land/Nick at Nite had best get off their 1990's crap-fascination (Roseanne is NOT classic television! Passable entertainment sometimes, maybe, but a pale shadow of shows like All in the Family, which did the drama/comedy/serious social issues thing earlier and better, thankyouverymuch) for a few nights and re-rerun some blocks of Green Acres and The Addams Family, whose iconic theme songs Mr. Mizzy (great TV name, eh?) was responsible for. When I was a kid you could measure your coolness by how many TV show theme song lyrics you knew by heart--well, that's how I assumed it was measured, anyway--and I did great! So rather than pursue a tangent about how upsetting it is that modern television has eschewed the theme song (which is very nearly the direction in which this post was heading--closer than you may realize, reader), let's instead bask in the nostalgia of a list of sitcoms whose theme song lyrics I had memorized at one point or another (and in some cases, still know):

• Green Acres
• Mr. Ed
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show
• WKRP in Cincinnati
• Welcome Back, Kotter
• Cheers
• The Jeffersons
• Happy Days
• Good Times
• The Golden Girls
• Gilligan's Island
• Laverne and Shirley

There's probably more, but I'd say those are the main ones--the core collection of the most influential. Of course, there's also the purely instrumentals to consider--they're just as influential, just as catchy, and sometimes haunting:

• M*A*S*H (yeah, I know there were lyrics made for the movie, I choose to ignore them)
• Barney Miller
• Get Smart
• The Bob Newhart Show (the one where he's a psychologist in Chicago, not an innkeeper in Vermont)
• The A-Team (technically no lyrics, although I had also memorized the spoken word dialog at the beginning at one time)
• Bewitched
• The Munsters (zany garage rock at its best)
  
• Star Trek
• I Love Lucy
• Sandford and Son

My brother once owned a CD with nothing but TV theme songs on it--needless to say it was invaluable to my early mixed tape efforts. Anyway, a good theme song is hard to come by these days, and they almost never have lyrics besides. The cop/investigator shows sometimes use screamy rock songs, but mostly subscribe to super-serious sounding riffs of a few seconds or so--the spooky shows have oft-inappropriate techno scores or just a few bars of a creepy sound flailing around the background while the credits roll, and the sitcoms are much too timid to lay anything on us but a couple seconds of self-conscious audio noodling. In short, the TV theme song business is being run by upwardly mobile music technology majors with soulless Midi systems who graduated from Berkley or wherever, while the energetic ad men like Vic Mizzy have faded into obscurity.

Oh well, readers--the next time you're sitting down to an episode of CSI: Miami, just plug your ears and sing quietly to yourself: "Greeeeen Acres is the place to be!/Faaaaarm livin' is the life for me!/Land spreadin' out so far and wide/Keep Manhattan, just gimme that country side!" It gives David Caruso the kind of quiet yearning I think his character is missing--just insert Eddie Albert's altruistic back-to-nature naivete where Caruso's hard nosed cynicism is and you'll realize that all those dumb puns are really just a crude representation of his anguished pining for the simple life.