If you stopped people on the street and asked them to sing the first TV theme song they could think of, they’d probably ask where the camera is and what the point is if you’re not filming this for TikTok or whatever. But if they actually did it, you’d probably hear a lot of the theme songs from Diff’rent Strokes and its spin-off, The Facts of Life.
Sing it with us now:
It taaakes DIFFERENT strooookes
It taaakes DIFFERENT strooookes
To mooove the wooooorld!
And:
Don’t Miss
You take the good
You take the bad
You take them both
And there you have the facts of life
The faaacts of life!
Would you believe that both of those songs were written by the same talented schmuck? And that you would never guess that schmuck was musically talented because he’s mostly known for being a sitcom star in his own right? There’s a lot of people that description could fit, so before you start poring over John Stamos’ Wikipedia page, we won’t keep you in suspense. It’s Alan Thicke?!?!
It turns out that, when Thicke came to Hollywood or at least Canada’s version of it, he wasn’t dead-set on being an actor. In fact, his biggest on-screen success before Growing Pains was as a Canadian talk show host, first of daytime’s The Alan Thicke Show and then the late-night Thicke of the Night. In between a handful of bit parts on TV and in movies, he also hosted game shows and, yes, wrote music, including TV theme songs. More than 40 of them.
“The challenge was, you have 24 seconds to do something catchy and memorable and sum up the entire premise of the show in case somebody had never seen it before,” he later said of the side hustle. “You had to do it with an internal rhyme scheme and a perky little ditty. So it was an interesting challenge.”
The process of writing the Diff’rent Strokes theme song was particularly unusual because, he said, he was “included from day one and page one. From the notion ‘Well, we’re developing this idea, and we kind of have an idea that it’s a couple of young black guys with an older white guy.’ And then you would get a copy of the script a month later … and then you’re invited to the taping, and then you do your own editing right through their editing, so that hopefully you all come together at the end when it’s time to deliver.”
They liked his deliverable so much that they brought him back for The Facts of Life. “The Facts of Life internal rhyme scheme was intricate and one that I remember finishing and saying ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good. That all rhymes,’” he later said. “I got a lot of rhyming words in 24 seconds.”
Listen, the greats aren’t always great at explaining their greatness. “Back then, theme songs were more important,” he lamented in 2010. “They were a part of every show. Nowadays, they don’t aspire to have memorable themes for every show … and certainly theme songs with a lyric. They have no time for that, so I think that’s almost a lost art.”
This was three years before Orange is the New Black premiered, so we’ll excuse that obvious display of ignorance.
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