Were the theme songs of the previous decade just regarded as overtly saccharine and insincere? So the equivalent of "emotional verisimilitude" was lyrics about, like, sincere dedication to each other and promising to beat the odds?
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I guess with the eighties being the Reagan era it kind of makes sense that there would be a lot of romanticizing Michael Bolton kinda paeans about the strength of familial love that gradually transitioned to a sanitized grunge disillusionment in the nineties but idk
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
You could talk about broad social trends about the '80s being an era when America buried its head in the sand and embraced conservatism and its accompanying sentimentality Although it may have just been a few specific people's success coloring our view of the era
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Frederick and Salvay were a songwriting team who made it big in the '80s with their signature style for sitcom theme songs -- they really liked big, epic lyrics with a soaring, heartstring-tugging melody
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The producer duo Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett (Miller-Boyett Productions), who'd already made Mork and Mindy and Laverne and Shirley, took a shine to Frederick and Salvay and commissioned theme songs for their big '80s hits from them
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
They're the ones who wrote the Perfect Strangers theme ("Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now"), the Full House theme ("Everywhere You Look"), the Family Matters theme ("As Days Go By"), the Step by Step theme ("Second Time Around")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Nowadays we might say that these lyrics come off as really melodramatic and overwrought for the kind of show they're actually about, like the whole defiant "It's MY life, it's MY dream/Nothing's gonna stop me now" is a bit much for Balki Bartoukomos' life story
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
But they kind of made that the expected style and it stuck for a decade and a half Like yeah I guess you could say people really did want sincerity at that time and previous eras' overt tweeness and goofiness felt old-fashioned
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Replying to @arthur_affect
that's kind of my thinking—that sincerity in a theme song felt like the emotional equivalent of going from 480p to 720p, like "look, we can use this new technology to act more like humans!"
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect
The CHEERS theme I guess kind of epitomizes this I haven't rigorously interrogated seventies theme songs or anything but I feel anecdotally like most of them were pretty cagey about admitting that sometimes, life sucks Whereas the thesis of that song is "sometimes, life sucks"
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"Sometimes you marry a trans woman by accident and then getting out of it is a huge pain in the ass"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
"I know we're talking about this great bar but I really did just need to take that moment to warn everyone"
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