10 Great Action/Adventure Cartoon Theme Songs

 There have been a lot of really catchy cartoon theme songs over the decades. Here are ten from American action/adventure cartoons (that call is debatable, but I wanted to exclude strictly comedic ones like The Flintstones, for example) that I think one could make a good case for being among the best. Here they are in chronological order.

Jonny Quest (1964)
Trey: This fast-paced, Space Age jazzy number composed by Hoyt Curtin really says action and speaks strongly of the era when it was recorded. According to Curtin in a 1999 interview, the band used for the sessions was a jazz ensemble with four trumpets, six trombones, five woodwind doublers, and a five-man rhythm section including percussion. It stands among the greatest theme songs of all time, period. 

Jason: I agree completely, but I must confess I can only regard this banger (and everything before 1985 on this list) through an obscuring mist of nostalgia. Coupled with the attractively Alex Toth-designed highlight reel of explosive violence and weird mystery, this complex, hyper-condensed piece of music captured my tiny heart from the first bongo beats. How could any TV cartoon series live up to the high bar set in this opening sequence? When I saw the show, it was many years in syndication, and the contrast with the then-current Saturday morning fare was profound. Even the theme music was more grown up!  

Spider-Man (1967)

Trey: Like the next one on my list, this catchy tune has escaped from the realm of cartoon themes into pop culture in general, being covered many times and even appearing in-universe in Spider-Man films. It was written by lyricist Paul Francis Webster and composer Bob Harris. The music was recorded at RCA Studios, New Yorks, and the vocals at RCA Studios in Toronto (where the cartoon was produced) featuring 12 CBC vocalists (members of the Billy Van Singers, and Laurie Bower Singers groups).

Jason: Here again, I regard this one as immortal and, in any honest evaluation, rank it among my favorite songs of all time by several entirely subjective criteria.  The Ramones version remains my top cover version while the Michael Bublé cover stands unchallenged as my top Michael Bublé song of all time. 

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969)

Trey: This bubble-gum pop earworm was written by David Mook and Ben Raleigh, and originally performed by Larry Marks. It's probably the most covered theme on this list.

Jason: It's a perfect piece of pop, quintessentially of its era, and ranks up there aesthetically with any "Sugar Sugar" or "Yummy Yummy Yummy" you'd care to name.  

Super-Friends (1973)

Trey: Another one from Hoyt Curtin, this is a more of a rousing, martial piece. The producers must have known they struck gold, because they kept it for 13 years, changes to narration aside. It is certainly eminently recognizable. I like this remix for a Cartoon Network promo by Michael Kohler, "The Time is Now."

Jason: A stately call to arms for the forces of good!  This type of instrumental-only action show theme song, often characterized by blaring brass sections and delivered with Wagnerian exuberance, practically constitutes a genre unto itself and dates back to the Fleischer Studios Superman shorts from the 1940s.

Hong Kong Phooey (1974)

Trey: In the early 70s, America was in the midst of a "kung fu craze," this show and theme rides that wave. It's short of funky, but also recalls the cliched "Oriental riff" and perhaps borrows a bit of inspiration from Schifrin's theme for Enter the Dragon. Scatman Crothers who voices the main character also sings here.

Jason: That this song is diabolically catchy, I cannot deny. It has stuck with me through long decades during which I neither sought out nor otherwise encountered the source material. 

MASK (1985)

Trey: This theme is a pure slice of the 80s and credited to the duo that dominated the era, Shuki Levy and Haim Saban. Levy's got a page devoted to his theme work, here.

Jason: MASK marks the spot on the timeline after which I will no longer be buoyed by any shred of nostalgia, having ascended to the snottiest and most dismissive epoch in my extended adolescence. I don't recall ever having heard this before, but I am immediately struck by the Flashdance-adjacent aesthetic.  

SilverHawks (1986)

Trey: SilverHawks may be a lazy attempt to iterate another hit from the ThunderCats template (see also TigerSharks), but I think it's got a superior theme song to the original. It was composed by Bernard Hoffer who did a lot of work for Rankin-Bass but was nominated for an Emmy for composing the theme used in the PBS News Hour (originally The MacNeil-Lehrer Report).

Jason: The haunting refrain of the title elevates the pop appeal of this theme, while also delivering the first genuine guitar shredding (or is it synthesizer? Or, heaven forfend, keytar?) yet heard in this listing. This is another first listen for me, and the professional craftsmanship is again evident. It's almost like there's a few surefire formulae in this theme song game.

X-Men (1992)

Trey: This iconic instrumental song with a futuristic (in now a very dated way) vibe was credited (as so many 80s and 90s cartoon theme songs were) to Haim Saban and Shuki Levy, but was written by Ron Wasserman who was under contract to Saban at the time. Wasserman says of the composition and recording in a 2022 interview: "I’d learned to play or emulate any instrument so I would have played every part. Just me, a MIDI keyboard, and a computer."

Jason: So iconic I know it, though I don't think I've watched a full episode of this series. While I am enjoying listening through this listing, maybe I'm starting to develop cartoon theme song fatigue at this point. Do I hear a bit of Miami Vice in this ditty, or have I taken leave of my senses?

Teen Titans (2003)

Trey: This was a well-written series with perhaps a deceptively cartoony look. The great power poppish theme song was written and performed by Japanese pop rock duo, Puffy AmiYumi.

Jason: This one I enjoy without resorting to ironic detachment or nostalgia of any kind. There's more than a small debt to Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man," but it's so dang catchy all is forgiven. 

Spidey And His Amazing Friends (2021)

Trey: My daughter loved this show when she was younger, and still revisits it's occasionally. It has a very catchy theme written and performed by Patrick Stump, who Wikipedia tells me is lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of Fall Out Boy.

Jason: Stump correctly ascertained that a Spidey theme needs to be propulsive enough to communicate the frantic action that will (presumably) follow. It's as good as any post-Fallout Boy emo tune I can currently recall (don't ask how many). Still, good stuff for the kids. Did your daughter enjoy the theme?

Trey: She did and still does!

Saturday Morning Cartoon Previews

This time every year, I get wistful for the old Saturday Morning Cartoon Preview shows the Big Three networks would run when I was a kid.


Often these shows would be accompanied with comic book ads promoting the new cartoons. (You can click to enlarge the ad below)

A lot has been written about the demise of the Saturday Morning Cartoons with most commenters lamenting the passing of such targeted programming. On one hand I can totally sympathize with such commenters. As each year would bring us a new round of cartoon shows to enjoy, it was a bit like Christmas for TV. In this pre-Internet age, you had no idea what each show might be like so there was always that compulsion to see them all. And if there was a scheduling conflict between two favorite shows, you had to choose one and hope the other lasted long enough to go into reruns.

Here's another great comic ad:

There is the knee jerk reaction to think that kids today are getting cheated because there are no more Saturday Morning Cartoon programming blocks. I think that's wrong. The landscaped has changed such that kids programming isn't restricted to just one day, but is now, in many cases, a 24/7 event on cable and satellite stations. In addition to that, Netflix and Amazon Prime give kids instant access to the shows they want when they want them. Man, I would have traded all my comics for a instant streaming version of the old 1967 Spider-man cartoon!


Still, as my friends and I would often remark, there was something cool about having one day out of the week set aside just for us kids. And the modern random introduction of new children shows lacks a lot of WOW factor when compared to the deluge of new shows we used to get every September.

What do you think?

- Jim

Flashback Universe and Its Amazing Friends

Face front, true believers!  Kick back like Dennis Marks in the screencap below and enjoy a fantastic foray into the Flashback Universe!

In case you don't recognize the name, Marks was the producer on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and its lesser-remembered sister show Friendless Spider-Man.  (O.K., that show was called just Spider-Man.)  As such, he's featured alongside writer Christy Marx, animator Larry Houston, and Stan Lee in this rarely seen 1981 documentary about the making of Amazing Friends, called Spider-Man on the Move.  According to Dan "Peter Parker" Gilvezan's Facebook fans, this was a joint production of KDKA in Pittsburgh and KPIX in San Francisco — which may be why I'd never seen it until recently.  (Did it air only in those markets?)

Sadly, it's not included on the series DVD* nor available to stream, but we can enjoy it online via the magic of YouTube.  Watch for Frank Welker discussing the process of working out what Ms. Lion should sound like.  That alone is worth your time.



Intermission! Grab some popcorn and a Coke.



Did you catch Marks explaining the creation of Firestar for the series at 5:25 in the first part?  The story he tells, about the show originally being planned around a trio of Spider-Man, Iceman, and the Human Torch, has been repeated often through the years.  It's perfectly plausible, and the version I had heard was that the Torch was absent from 1978's The New Fantastic Four cartoon* (you know, with H.E.R.B.I.E.) because his licensing was tied up in the even-then-in-development Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.  That story was usually told to debunk the notion the Human Torch had been removed from the FF cartoon out of fear of kids settling themselves on fire — the same story Marks tells here about Amazing Friends!

Which got me wondering:  Did Marks's story from this very documentary special, rarely seen as it is, create the perennial kids-setting-themselves-on-fire myth?  Did it backwash from here to the earlier FF cartoon?

Apparently not.

Let's loop back and close off some rumor threads.

As it turns out, the Human Torch character was not tied up in the development of the Spider-Man/Torch/Iceman show that would later become Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.  According to Mark Evanier, whose business cards may as well read "who would know," the Torch was licensed out to Universal for a live-action TV movie that never came to fruition.  (If it had, it would have been a sibling to the Doctor Strange and Captain America telefilms starring Peter Hooten and Reb Brown, which also came out of the deal.)

Brian Cronin, of CBR's Comic Book Legends Revealed, speculates that the Torch license still lay with Universal when Amazing Friends was in development.  Given that the Strange and Cap films aired in 1978 and '79, Amazing Friends started airing in '81, and animation takes a fair while to develop for television, this seems reasonable.  (Then again, the first bit of poppycock I shared with you "seems reasonable," so take that with a grain of salt.)

He makes being on fire look so cool!

In that case, the Human Torch was likely never a serious contender for the third slot in the Spider-Friends — except perhaps during the very early concept stage, before anyone checked the availability of the characters against existing licensing agreements.  It's not impossible that Marvel, working almost in-house with a studio they had bought and turned into Marvel Productions, could have made the novice mistake of incubating a series without checking the licenses.  But even that seems unlikely — grain of salt in the "seems," remember — because the earliest concept art for the show, by John Romita for the pitch to NBC, shows Firestar (then "Heatwave") in the line-up, with no mention of the Torch.

It's also worth noting that Marvel Productions, before being bought by Marvel and given that name, had been DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, the studio that produced The New Fantastic Four back in '78.

So where did that story about kids setting themselves on fire to emulate the Human Torch come from?  Dunno.  I was excited to watch Spider-Man on the Move and hear it from Dennis Marks himself.  I thought I'd found the point where it entered the culture, but, by all accounts, Marks was repeating a story he'd heard somewhere, one that had already made the rounds about The New Fantastic Four.

Wherever it comes from, it's a proper urban legend, complete with gruesome imagery of child immolation.  It's liable to survive in some form or other.

Decades before we'd heard of creepypasta, John Byrne mined the legend's seediness and silliness in Fantastic Four #285, which reads like a cross between an ABC after-school special, Amazing Spider-Man #50, and a Jim Wynorski melodrama.  More recently, The Super Hero Squad Show enjoyed one of its high points lampooning both the rumor and its status as inside-baseball trivia in a H.E.R.B.I.E.-centric episode.

Any day now, I expect to hear Marvel let Fox hang onto the Fantastic Four movie license in order to keep their distance from any Human Torch-related incidents.

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* Getcher Region 2 DVD players here, America!