I do like what happened to the opening titles, in season 6. However this FALCON CREST follower had reservations, from 40 years ago. Did the the limo over Golden Gate and the family's pet falcon Apollo really need to be omitted? I'm sure TPTB could've put their foot down and made sure these original FC opening elements, were included in the reborn opening credits.
And they actually filmed the new white limo on the bridge -- and then didn't use it!!
Opening theme designs can be tweaked over the years, but there has to be some continuity. And removing the limo and Apollo was too great a shift, indicating someone behind the camera might be losing creative objectivity -- it was symptomatic of other problems to come.
Just as DALLAS' opening credits beginning with the earthen dam blowing up for the last two seasons was also a bad sign.
I didn't mind FC'S ripple effect, but it wasn't very polished, and there should never have been one between
every actor's title card.
DYNASTY had the same opening credits design from start to finish, not that it helped or inspired the writers in the second third of the eighties.
Actually, I might have liked DYNASTY's opening credits to have shifted to a new shot of the mountains and a new shot of Denver's cityscape mid-way through the series, as the lack of any change there bespoke of creative fatigue, too. (The theme's orchestration became increasingly dead-ish -- one member on this website once described it as "the screech of a skinned cat", the once sparkling orchestration replaced by an irritating direness).
Yet their replacing the actors' title card backgrounds with a second shot of the actors didn't work either -- largely because of the ones they used (Krystle in a simpering, fuzzy shot with Kwythsteeeeeena on her lap?? Alexis in the bathtub freezing in mid-blink??). Probably, DYNASTY's title cards should have stayed with jewels, furs, and geographic Colorado location shots which they could update over the years.
But, as I've said for decades: in series TV, when one thing everything slides along with it.
And the audience feels.
he final season of DYNASTY is the best closing to a series, I've ever watched.
It really was. If only they'd given Paulsen the creative carte blanche he'd requested for Season 6 (when they first tried to get him) then the last half of muddled DYNASTY would be far better remembered. (Rita Lakin, a good writer who toiled unhappily on Season 7, described the showrunners, the Pollocks, as "not proper writers," while Esther Shapiro and Doug Cramer extolled the Pollocks' virtues for the rest of their lives, calling them "brilliant constructionists" -- which the Pollocks absolutely were not).
Even before DYNASTY, the Pollocks were known for being good at casting and unformed story ideas, but dreadful at detail and pacing.
When Paulsen finally came in for Season 9, he told the Shapiros that he couldn't figure out or understand what the Pollocks had been doing with the narrative. The Shapiros responded, "neither do we," but that's not what they said publicly -- Esther later claiming that "the show was taken away from us" (when she actively went after Paulsen herself) to explain DYNASTY's cancellation, with no mention of its excruciating slide long before Paulsen got there... But they're all the best of friends now.
