TV themes! Another obsession of mine. It's their nature as miniatures. The longest shadow, of course, is the Doctor Who theme (and I credit the Howell version nearly as much as I do the Derbyshire version, Howell put work into it and it shows - '70s and early '80s Radiophonic is as much my wheelhouse as the austere brutalist soundscapes of the '60s). Particularly themes outside of scripted TV shows. In America, for instance, I grew up with the theme song to the People's Court, a squalid burlesque of justice (not dissimilar to the American jurisprudence system today, honestly) presided over by the aged Judge Wapner, now mainly remembered for having his image licensed out to a fairly terrible novelty soda pop company. Ah, the theme, on the other hand... they went for "dramatic", and also "cheap", so they licensed out a bit of library music by Alan "Bullet" Tew. The times being what they were, the song, "The Big One", was a monster funk jam, one of the better achievements of a musician whose wheelhouse was in the realm of monster funk jams.
My response was not to think that "gee, that Judge Wapner sure is funky", but to fail to acknowledge the funk. That is, to treat the People's Court TV song as totally normal and appropriate to the show, the same way a certain subset of music listeners treat Good Vibrations as a totally normal and ordinary song that's not really any different from their previous #1 hit, "Barbara Ann", or "Kokomo" for that matter.
In my late teens there was a series of CDs out on TVT called "Television's Greatest Hits". I played a lot of them, got obsessed with themes to shows I never saw, like "I Married Joan". Partly it's my obsessive love of music but partly it's my habit of defining things through incidental happenstance.
As the available pool of media grows I become more precise and more arbitrary in my standards. Since 3/3/2016 (when I bought my most recent computer, and therefore the start of my ability to track my listening chronologically) I've added ten songs to my library with tags matching the regexp "TV Theme" (four of them in the last month!) That's manageable.
I plan for more, because I also do love logo jingles, but that rabbit hole is inexhaustible and defies my efforts at management, at personal evaluation, which is the basis of everything here - a stamp of approval at least.
Fight! - The Flashing Blade TV Theme (by The Musketeers) - added 2018-09-20: Few of these themes are from American shows, few of them from shows I've seen. The fascists go on about the superiority of "European culture" but it's alien culture to me. I'm an American. My culture is the Temptations, and yes I'm as territorial and chauvinist about it as any fascist but I've seen the results of those arguments and I know well enough to go any further than "The Temptations were fucking awesome". Disagree at your peril.
I don't know what passes for "general knowledge", everything I learn comes in sideways, as incidental background to a rabbit hole I'm tunneling down. "The Flashing Blade", it was in colour, it was a dub of a French TV show, it was well-known enough that Russell T Davies did a comedy redub of it for a children's show he was working on in the '80s or '90s, of which I have a few episodes though not all. They're on The List. From here we branch into my bizarre conspiracy theories. I have a million of them. They go as easily as they come. I had this one theory that Salamander in "The Enemy of the World" was a conscious response to Khan in "Space Seed", because the character of Salamander was a Mexican, as was the actor playing Khan, and because his ship was the Botany Bay, which of course was a ship colonizing AUSTRALIA, which was the nominal setting of "The Enemy of the World"... pull in enough coincidental and irrelevant information and you can build a plausible narrative out of it. Then I kicked over that sand castle by learning that "Space Seed" wasn't broadcast in the UK until after "The Enemy of the World" had already been broadcast; in conspiracy theories, unlike in the real world, "How?" and "Why?" are the most interesting questions.
(While I am here I will note in passing that Montalban's earliest screen credit was in a 1940s "soundie" miming a song called "He's A Latin From Staten Island". I have a digital copy of it somewhere, though not in my music library.)
My actual conspiracy theory, for which I have no empirical evidence whatsoever, is that the cult favorite Genesis song "The Knife" (_Trespass_, 1970) was not just a caustic response to violent-left radicalism, but was specifically a send-up of the theme to "The Flashing Blade", which has certain thematic and musical similarities, starting with the title. In another wing of my Library of Babel, where the stuff I thought about doing but never got around to resides, there is an edit of the theme to "The Flashing Blade" with an edit of "The Knife" used as the theme music.
I have a little bit of a problem with scope. More later.
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