The Killer himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, performs one of his greatest hits while Hooker, Romano, Stacy and some hangers-on watch and talk amongst themselves in one of Hooker's finest uses of source music (i.e. music whose "source" appears on-screen).
THE POWER. The Majesty. The Glory that is T.J. Hooker...now yours for the viewing.
SEASON TWO OPENING TITLES: Early T.J. Hooker unleashed: Hooker on the wing of a plane. Hooker running through trees. Romano pirouetting up a chain-link fence. Stacy's coy glances. Stoic Captain Sheridan.
SEASON THREE OPENING TITLES: Middle-period Hooker at its best; Hooker sliding on ice. Romano with a shotgun. Stacy's finger-snapping exotic dance routine, and Jim Corrigan. Not to mention those classy titles done up in fancy block letters containing flashing police lights. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
SEASON FOUR OPENING TITLES: A slight downturn in quality. Gone is the fancy police-light typeface, replaced with a bland yellow Goudy. Perhaps the series' typography was meant to convey a more somber tone with the impending departure of Vince Romano, as season four ended with Hooker transferred to Chicago, wiping the slate clean for a possible fresh start on ANBC. But it was not to be...
SEASON FIVE OPENING TITLES: The downturn in quality plummets into a canyon of mediocrity as Vince Romano is excised from the opening credits in lieu of more footage of Stacy undercover as a prostitute. Even that wasn't enough to keep this last-ditch late night season on CBS on the air past a single season, and alas, Hooker was gone for good.
TJ-HOOKER.COM EXCLUSIVE :
SNL T.J. HOOKER SKETCH (8.0MB Quicktime movie) William Shatner appears as Hooker in a Saturday Night Live sketch from 1987. Altho it loses points for inaccuracy (Romano is called "Vinnie", Hooker lives in San Francisco, etc.) it features a nice parody of Shatner's hood-jumping. With appearances by Dana Carvey as Romano & Victoria Jackson as Stacy.
