Screenshot: YouTube

Star Trek: The Next Generation credits sequences are legendary, from their mythic expository speech to the reassuring introduction of a large cast of likable characters. Their every word and shot is canon to the shows’ legion of superfans. While TV credits have gotten increasingly complex in recent years, to the point that now they’re pretty much separate short films worthy of individual analysis, there was something wonderful about the tone-setting uniformity of those old Star Trek: TNG intros, the adventure-serial sweep of the music and appealing reintroduction to each character.


Perhaps that is why they have proven to be such fertile source material for credit-on-credit cross-breeding on YouTube. Folks, everybody knows your name at Ten Forward:

Perhaps the throughline is Will Riker, still a raffish son-of-a-gun in this Boston Legal riff on the series:

The question is, how did this gang of unemployable misfits afford a spaceship like that, right? Rent control?

It even goes back to the damn A-Team:

And MacGyver:

And Dallas:

Sometimes there doesn’t need to be a reason for a thing to exist. It just does. Anyway, clean your palate with this runthrough of all the series intros.

Here’s hoping the new Star Trek: Discovery kicks off with something equally mythic, conventional, and open to being spliced with True Detective credits, or whatever.