my personal ranking of OG star trek intros
5. Star Trek The Original Series
ICONIC. Classic. Deserves respect for being the first. But the frilly "ahhh ahhh AHHhh" vocalizations always made me chuckle growing up and it is very very dated. Also the theme is kind of short compared with all the rest, the visuals are kind of ho-hum.. some of this is just unfortunately due to better graphics and more money in later series being able to impress me more. But what can ya do. Please note I'm not saying it's a BAD intro because it's not. It's just my least favorite!
4. Star Trek The Next Generation
Another iconic, classic theme - but it is a theme that's just taken from the movies, so, it kind of takes a hit in that department for me. But of course, it's SO GOOD that really who cares. A rousing theme that is fully on board with the ADVENTURE! IN! SPACE!! attitude of Star Trek, which is almost kind of funny considering how much more time TNG actually spends with intellectual, thoughtful plotlines and conflicts being resolved with diplomacy instead of space battles, LOL. But anyway, the theme paired with the visuals just makes for a solid opening intro. It's good, but also, there's nothing extra exciting about it. However the modernized voiceover with Picard saying "where no one has gone before" instead of "where no man has gone before" is A+
God where do I begin. First off - I actually have a huge soft spot in my heart for this song and I WILL sing along unironically. But this was an extremely controversial theme song and for good reason - it really broke the mold for Trek intros and not necessarily in a good way. It just felt too contemporary, for a show that's supposed to be about a grand space adventure in the future. All the other songs are orchestral affairs, and this is a pop ditty. And we won't even talk about how they tried to "fix it" for s3 on by increasing the tempo and adding the over the top electric guitar outro ;_; BUT, visuals-wise, the Enterprise intro is beautiful and a really good encapsulation of what ST Ent was meant to be about - humans finally sciencing their way into the future and being able to explore the stars. The intro uses real footage of real human events (first plane flights! the space program! the Enterprise shuttle! the ISS!) to lead up to the first warp flight and it's just really lovely. It's hopeful and optimistic in all the right ways Star Trek should be.
2. Star Trek Deep Space Nine
DS9 is where they first started to really lean into the emotionality of Trek as main sources of storytelling conflict, imo, and the title song reflects it. I like that there's no voiceover because, while that's fine for the shows that had it, it is a little old fashioned feeling. There's a certain majesty about the DS9 theme that is in tune with the premise of the show, which is essentially a space station out in the frontier. The visuals of the intro do lack a little because, well, it's hard to make a space station that never moves very exciting, LOL. So it's just a lot of slow pans of the station. In the later couple seasons of the show they did the same maneuver as Ent - they increased the tempo a bit, tried to make the song a bit more 'exciting', and by that point in the show they'd added the Defiant, so they put in a couple shots of that ship zooming around. But it was kind of weird additions if you ask me and idk, the earlier versions of the intro were just better.
And finally, my favorite of all the intros, VOYAGERRRRR. The theme song itself is so beautiful. Entirely from an orchestral standpoint, I think this song is a technical step above every other. The song creates its own narrative throughout, with the heavy timpani drums and a robust string section, it's a very good arrangement in its own right. And it's just so so so pretty - kind of sad, to reflect the Voyager's doomed fate storyline, but with a hint of adventure and optimism, as they make their journey home despite all the odds. Plus the visuals are just the best of all the shows. The Voyager soaring through a solar flare! breaking its way through a nebula like an icebreaker ship in the arctic! and all the various space phenomena - comets and asteroids and eclipses and planets and the rings around planets - very cool. I always loved the in universe concept of Voyager - all the other ships (eg the various Enterprises) are first contact ships, but Voyager is a SCIENCE VESSEL. Its mission was always exploration, and even though they were flung across the galaxy and sentenced to this new mission of just trying to get home, the whole plot centered around the fact that Voyager could not shed its mission of science and exploration and so they continue to do that throughout the series. Learning all they can as they go. ANYWAY I'm waxing poetic because Voyager is my favorite Trek to boot, but. The intro for the show is just so good, like, where I would group #5-2 pretty close together in my rankings, this one is like 10 steps above everyone else.
The "In a Mirror, Darkly" episode arc from Star Trek Enterprise with the mirror universe intro, showing off the war-mongering side of this alternate humanity, instead of the optimistic and adventurous one. Hah!
