There's no denying at this point that Friends was a big deal. The iconic comedy was wildly popular during its heyday on NBC, and led to a lot of the people involved with the show going on to create other popular movies and TV shows. However, just because a show does a lot of things right doesn't mean it can't also do a few things wrong. In a recent interview, former Friends Jennifer Aniston revealed one thing she really didn't think worked on the TV series: the comedy's opening sequence. Here's how she really felt about "I'll Be There For You."
No one was really a big fan of that theme song. We felt it was a little... I don't know. Dancing in a pond? A fountain felt sort of odd... We did it because we were told to.
Well, that's a pretty honest response if there ever was one. The Friends theme song, "I'll Be There For You," as sung by The Rembrandts, is pretty iconic at this point. A good chunk of the population knows there are four claps in the fun clapping portion of the track. A smaller but still valid portion of the population has sung the song at karaoke at least once. It's an iconic theme song, but if you look at the weird stuff the Friends cast gets into in the introduction, the whole thing gets a whole lot weirder. Check it out.
Speaking with the BBC's The One Show, Jennifer Aniston revealed a few things about her time on Friends including the fountain hijinks the cast was asked to get up to in the opening introduction, which persisted until the show went off of the air in 2004. At the point when they filmed the original footage none of the cast members on Friends were famous, nor did they have any real contract leverage. So if they were told to dance around in a fountain and look super goofy doing it, that was probably what they were going to do. That doesn't mean that Jennifer Aniston was super happy about it, even at the time though:
Or maybe that was just her face. Regardless, while clapping in a fountain while "I'll Be There For You" played may not have been Friends' finest moment or Jennifer Aniston's favorite job on the show, it did become iconic, rubber ducks, couch in the street and all. Years later, she's still getting asked about it, and we're happy to hear her be pretty candid about the experience.
What other shows have surprisingly weird introductions? Let us know in the comments, below. And check out some of the coolest intros, here.
