8 thoughts on “The Hogan Family Had the Cheapest Credits Change in TV History

  1. C’mon, Brian, if they sprang for added credits scenes, that means one less Corvette for the producers.

    All jokes aside, I didn’t know that intro credits for TV shows were so oddly expensive. No wonder plenty of shows just run clips from the pilot (or from episodes during the season) with text crawling over it rather than film any new footage. That way even when you change things to account for new characters (like, say, the various intros for TJ HOOKER did), it’s cheaper because they’re essentially using stock footage.

  2. With The Hogans, couldn’t they have done something to “zoom in” on Bateman and Witting, which would essentially cut Hodges out of frame? I mean, we had pan-and-scan for movies on broadcast television.

    Remember when Turner debuted widescreen format and people needed to be sold on it? I remember seeing ads for 2001 comparing letterbox to standard showing how two characters could be in a shot instead of cutting between them.

  3. All jokes aside, I didn’t know that intro credits for TV shows were so oddly expensive.

    I think it’s less that it is particularly expensive and more that it is just ENOUGH of an added expense that they prefer just to avoid as much of the costs as possible, as the costs would have to come out of the much more important regular episode budgets. Choosing between making a cooler looking opening credits and giving a better ending to Episode, like, 17, I think most TV producers would go with the latter.

  4. The last name of Sandy Duncan’s father had the last name Hogan but wasn’t Hogan the last name of Sandy Duncan’s husband? Why did they allow this blooper?

  5. Guesses as to expense:
    * Trailers are a specific type of editing, done by different people to the editing of films (except for Suicide Squad). Opening titles seem like they’re the same. Specialist editors, possibly not even in-house. So rather than being part of the process of making an episode, they’re an additional task.
    * They’re a once-off job, but they appear up to 26 times a year and perhaps multiple years. They’re probably charged at many times their “value” to cover that. Although Joss was looking at an one-time use for Buffy, perhaps negotiating a reduced price was “too hard.”
    * While adding a single credit for an episode seems easy, opening titles are synced to the theme song, so it’s probably a lot more work than just adding a clip. Plus, you’d probably need a different group shot, etc.

    And, the reality is it wouldn’t have been much of a problem. Watching a first episode, especially where the cast isn’t famous, you usually don’t notice who is or isn’t in the credits first time through. Later viewings, maybe, but then you already know the twist.

    Ads for shows and the information released and speculation before them are bigger issues. Not as much of a probably back then, but certainly now. Torchwood promoted their show pretending that the first episode death was an ongoing character (but they also included her in the first episode’s credits)

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