Is it the nose?
Also, how did I watch this show for thirty-two years without realizing the lecherous, zombie-looking drunk grasping Retro Rebecca’s leg in the bottom-right corner? Regardless, what a great visual metaphor for everything wonderful and everything awful about bars.
Two: Does anyone else think that the guy who sings the Cheers theme sounds remarkably like Woody Harrelson?
Again, it’s just a weird coincidence, since Woody doesn’t show up until the fourth season, but I notice the similarity every time I hear the opening credits.
Three: Speaking of the show’s music, the incidental score that leads in from commercials feature this melancholy woodwind tune — oboe? clarinet? flute? I am orchestrally illiterate — that repeatedly makes me think of the first notes from the “game over” music from Final Fantasy VI. (Yes, this is as drilled-down as my geek interests get: a footnote from an old RPG meets the score from an 80s sitcom.)
Four: Who would have thought that time-traveling Macaulay Culkin would have been hiding in the last frame of the opening credits all these years?
Discussion question: Exactly what is the purpose of the old-timey photos and illustrations in the series’ opening credits? Is it to suggest that the bar is time-honored part of American life? Or is it telling us that Cheers was quietly, subtly about time travel this whole time?
My guess is that they saw the one photo of the old-timey guy that looks like George Wendt and decided they needed to make a whole opening credits sequence around it.
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