Angie

Today I stumbled upon the opening credits of a sitcom I’d never seen before: the short-lived Angie, from 1979-1980, on ABC. It was a romantic sitcom starring Donna Pescow, an actress I’d previously associated with 1970s reruns of The Match Game (but who’s apparently better known for Saturday Night Fever), and Robert Hays, later of Airplane and the Starman TV series. It started out as a ratings hit, but it apparently crashed and burned after the lead characters got married in the second-season premiere.

Still, I love this theme song — it’s so 1970s and cheesy and tuneful! It’s by Maureen McGovern and apparently became a brief pop hit and now I can’t get it out of my head. And how about that whole come-into-the-circle-and-pose-and-smile thing? That’s so Love Boat! Awesome. (I’ve always wondered how the actors know where to stand so that they’re inside the circle. How does that work?)

Even better, here’s the full song:

Contact

Last night Matt and I saw The Farnsworth Invention, the new Aaron Sorkin play about the invention of television. It got me thinking about the history of broadcasting, which then got me thinking about the opening scene of the movie Contact, which is one of the coolest movie openings ever — as we pull away from Earth, we come into contact with older and older radio waves, umtil we reach the silent infinite void that existed before anything was ever broadcast.

I looked for it on YouTube, and of course it’s there.