The Big Bang Theory's Creator Came Up With The '80s Most Radical Theme Song
"The Big Bang Theory" co-creator Chuck Lorre has quite a few impressive accomplishments under his belt. He's contributed to several award-winning shows, working as a young writer on shows like "Roseanne" and "Charles in Charge" before moving into co-creating and executive producing hits like "Dharma & Greg," "Two and a Half Men," and "The Big Bang Theory." He's a television industry titan who has become one of the greats in sitcom history, but he also has a very surprising credit as well — he was the writer of the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" theme song. That's right, the impossibly catchy theme song from the 1987 CBS cartoon series came courtesy of the same man who introduced the world to Sheldon Cooper and popularized the phrase "Bazinga!" (Maybe that's why Sheldon's favorite theme song is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," followed by "Inspector Gadget" and the "Spider-Man" cartoon theme.)
The story behind the creation of the "Ninja Turtles" theme song is almost as magical as a bunch of turtles getting turned into ninja warriors via radioactive goo and the help of a rat sensei, and Lorre shared it all in an interview with the Archive of American Television for EmmyTVLegends.org. In the interview, he revealed that he was brought in at the last minute and only had a shoestring budget, but somehow he made television theme song history.
Chuck Lorre wrote the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song at the eleventh hour
The theme to the 1987 CBS animated "Ninja Turtles" series is deceptively simple, mostly just repeating the name of the show as a chorus and using the verses to describe the characters in rather basic overtures. Lorre told the Archive that he was hired at the last minute after the 1960s band The Turtles dropped out, and he had to come up with a theme on the fly. He and co-writer Dennis C. Brown then apparently read as many of the comics as they could (it was still an underground black-and-white comic at the time) and looked at some of the animated clips that were ready. Based on that and the turtle's personality traits, they created the theme, which has been used (and remixed) for the franchise ever since:
"I had like two thousand dollars to do the whole thing and we got a recording studio in Los Angeles that was at the time being used by Journey to record an album and we got the studio from midnight to 8:00 a.m. which is the cheapest hours you can buy, you know. And all their equipment was spread out, all this great big touring stadium equipment was all over the studio and we're in there recording the turtles theme song at five o'clock in the morning, and it worked."
The theme was sung by studio performer James Mandell with Lorre on guitar, and though Lorre has become much more famous as a TV writer and producer than he ever did as a composer and guitarist, writing the catchiest TV theme song of the 1980s is a pretty radical legacy all on its own.