My So-Called Life (1994)

“School is a battlefield for your heart.” — Angela Chase

"Go. Now. Go." The soft muffled bomps of the xylophone, the whisper, the shimmering cymbals – the title sequence of My So-Called Life is familiar to any disenchanted teen girl from the mid-’90s. Along with director Scott Winant, relatively green composer W.G. Snuffy Walden captured the alienated zeitgeist of ’90s grunge culture at the top of the show. "The original idea for the theme came out of the opening cue of the pilot when the girls were running around the mall," Walden says on The Complete Series DVD. "And there's even a line I stole from it." That would be Rayanne Graff (A.J. Langer) whispering to her new best friend, Angela Chase (Claire Danes). To that he added "more of an electrified teen angst" and his friend, singer Julian Raymond, whom he told simply to soar. "To me that brought the humanness to it," Walden said. "To use just a voice as an instrument that spoke to that youth."

The result is what Dave Holmes at Vulture considers the best theme song of 1994-1995's "epic" television season, which also included hits like Party of Five, Seinfeld, and ER. "It conveys anticipation, growth, aggression, confusion," he wrote. "If nothing else, it lets you know you’re about to spend 44 minutes watching something great." So does the montage of scenes that are cut to it, culminating in the iconic image of Angela running down a school hallway into the light.



Winant had worked with the show's creators, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, on their boomer drama thirtysomething (he cut those titles as well) – as had title designer Kathie Broyles – and it was MSCL writer Winnie Holzman who insisted he direct the pilot, from which he spliced the intro. "My So-Called Life was very personal to me because we shot the series at my high school, so it was kind of surreal," he says. "There were still teachers there that were there when I was in school. It was really kind of bizarre."

In a similar way, a look back at the intro to My So-Called Life is like flipping through a musical slideshow of your own high school experience, regardless of when you grew up. In particular, that feeling of despair, confusion and elation, sometimes all at once, which was never just a '90s phenomenon and, in fact, forms the tapestry of adulthood as well as long as you keep watching out for it.

A discussion with Director SCOTT WINANT and Title Designer KATHIE BROYLES.

How did you come up with the concept for the main title?

Scott: I went with a composer, Snuffy Walden, who I hired on thirtysomething, who I discovered out of thin air. Snuffy and I would collaborate on the music and then I would go in and use the dailies from what we had. At the time generally all we had was the pilot and I would cut that material against the music.

There were certain iconic images that I wanted to put in the pilot that obviously serviced…

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