This week I’m posting theme songs from old shows that provided the backstory to the viewer. As I mentioned yesterday, simply putting up the well known ones would be far too simple. So I’m providing a glimpse of both the flop shows and the hits. Today’s flop is ‘Occassional Wife’, which aired on NBC during the 1966/67 season. It starred Michael Callan and Patricia Harty and you may be forgiven for asking yourself “who the hell are they?” since nobody actually knows the answer to that question. Strangely, this tale of a married but unmarried couple led to the actors themselves getting married once the show was booted from the NBC line-up. Even stranger, they then got unmarried a few years later. But the strangest part of the above opening credits is that while ‘Occasional Wife’ has a theme song, it only occasionally functions. You see, they provided a backstory explanation for the viewer but somehow forgot to set it to lyrics. Thus we have a narrator explaining the show’s dopey set-up intercut with dopey clips of the dopey stars. This strikes me as straight up lazy and cheap–like the budget didn’t allow for a lyricist and one of the producers simply said ‘the hell with it, theme songs are old hat’. Below I’ve posted the memorable opening theme from the abominable ‘F Troop’. In spite of the explanation, I still don’t fully grasp how his sneezing turned the battle around, nor the reason for the blood being spilled somehow getting him the gig running ‘F Troop’. The lyrics are by Irving Taylor, who wrote the lyrics for ‘Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime’ (otherwise known as ‘theme from Dean Martin show’) and the music is by one William Lava, who apparently specialized in atonal scores for Warner Brothers cartoons of the late 50s and 60s (you know, when they began to suck). Come back tomorrow. It will get worse…