Opening Credits Cast Party

Totally not staged for the opening credits.

You might never see them all in one place during the show itself. They move in their own circles and follow separate storylines. Yet there they are every week, all these people that are somehow connected to each other, standing there self-consciously with fixed grins and arms around each others' shoulders for a big gang portrait, like they're at a family reunion and someone broke out the video cameras. Are we looking at the actors, or the characters? It's kind of hard to tell.

If they're not just standing there, they're on the move, walking together like a chorus line, and that blurs things even more. They're all dressed and made up like their characters on the show, but why would they be all walking together, and so purposefully? It feels like the camera has caught the actors heading for the set at the top of the shooting day. If it's particularly heroic, it's a Team Power Walk, but it might just be the cast walking together in a tight group in exactly the sort of fashion you'd never see them do on the show itself.

What's perhaps strangest about this trope is that, whereas the Title Sequence is most often compiled by raiding your own show for clips, these awkward group portrait or kick-line moments usually have to be filmed specially, on purpose. The other big problem here is that if the cast changes, you have to reshoot the cast party with the new cast, sometimes over and over again—perhaps unpleasantly drawing attention to missing faces and unloved interlopers.

To fully qualify for this trope, the credits cast party needs to show the cast artificially grouped together for the camera, essentially breaking the Fourth Wall, rather than just interacting as they would on the show. Bonus points for getting all the cast together even if some of them would never be together in the show.

Compare Covers Always Lie, when it's only the cover art that does this.

Supertrope of the V-Formation Team Shot, where the Gang of Five poses in a heroic V. Compare the Team Shot and Establishing Team Shot, where the gang are posed together. Compare Title Montage, where the opening titles harvest various clips from the show instead.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The opening of Bungo Stray Dogs shows all three main organizations quickly, nicely lined up for a split second.
• Most openings of Case Closed / Case Closed feature really big Cast Parties - the detective kids, the Mouris, the Tokyo Police, Hattori and Kazuha, FBI, end so on.
• In the fifth and final opening of Code Geass, there's a long shot where the main and supporting casts pass the POV on all sides with jubilant expressions, regardless of whether the person next to them is a staunch ally or sworn enemy.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny have a love for ending sequences where multiple members from enemy factions improbably stand together in the same area. The first ending sequences of each show are pretty melancholy, being a pan over the characters looking sad standing among the wreckage of their Humongous Mecha and spaceships. Destiny's third and fourth endings are more jubilant, with them (even some who died in the previous show) hanging out at the countryside or the beach or just floating together in space.

Live Action Television

• The original Beverly Hills, 90210 began doing this at the top of its opening credits starting with the second season, ganging its cast in front of a photo-shoot-style white background, laughing with each other and smiling for the camera. (Of course, this being Beverly Hills, it's not too hard to believe that bunches of beautiful teenagers are doing photo shoots together every day of the week.) They carried the trope forward for the rest of its ten-season run, and given the constant cast changes it had to be reshot on a regular basis, seeming less and less spontaneous each time, until it was finally rammed into the ground with the many-times mutated cast milling around looking like they were just hanging out waiting for the series to finally die.
• The sister show of Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, had one of these at the very earliest stages (i.e., pre-Heather Locklear), with the huge, unwieldy cast marching down the eponymous street arm in arm in an intimidating phalanx of put-on camaraderie. The shot appeared both at the start of the credits and at the end, too, just to remind you that you really did see something that false in the opening titles.
  • The less-noticeable but possibly more bizarre flashes shown of all eight cast members huddled around the far half of a pool table, Last Supper-style, with some combination of them attempting to somehow play in those cramped conditions is another example.
• Similarly, the opening credits of Popular featured the entire main cast at a photoshoot together, despite the premise of the show being that the two main groups of characters hated each other, and the unpopular, brunette clique weren't exactly the photoshoot types. Bonus points for including the two 'parent' characters who, as the show went on, were rarely seen outside of the opening sequence.
• Law & Order and some of its spin-offs routinely end their opening credits with the four main principals striding purposefully down a corridor together, presumably because that's where the courthouse vending machine is.
• It's a Living/Making a Living started off its credits with its waitresses all joining up to merrily walk arm in arm toward the big steel skyscraper atop which sat the luxury restaurant they worked in. The show's troubled history and revolving door cast meant this artificial scene was reshot more than once.
• The opening of Charlie's Angels originally included the three angels, Jill, Sabrina, and Kelly, walking together toward the camera partway through the credits—the premise being that the three left police work together to work for Charles Townsend. When Jill was replaced by Kris (Cheryl Ladd), this was reshot with Sabrina and Kelly walking together, and Kris coming in from the side to join them. And so on.
• The sprawling cast of Soap required three cast pictures in the opening credits — the Tates, the Campbells, and all of them together. This had to be redone more than once because of cast changes, resulting in different gags: first a fight breaks out among the characters, then another version had the ceiling collapse on them as they stiffly pose, then a return to the fight idea.
• The second round of credits for Eight is Enough involved, somewhat plausibly, the Bradford brood forming a human pyramid under the show's cascading title, which then collapses. But the real awkward posing comes just a bit later, as the odd number of alphabetical-order co-starring cast members ends up putting Willie Aames backed up against a wall pretending to share a laugh with two of his on-screen siblings, Dianne Kay and Connie Newton.
  • In later seasons this becomes Aames, Kay, and Newton very unconvincingly washing dishes together. Note that in both set-ups one of the three—Aames in the first, Kay in the second—visibly glances off camera to make sure they need to keep going.
• The beginning and end of the Growing Pains opening credits showed the Seavers standing together outside their house for a family portrait. The reprise changed every year, as the characters went back into the house leaving one of them to mug for the camera.
• Full House gives everyone their own introduction shot. But by the end of the credits, they're all goofing around and having dinner (seasons 1 and 2), a cookout in the backyard (season 3), or a picnic (season 4 through the end of series).
• After the first season, Family Ties avoided having everyone posing awkwardly together by having an anonymous hand working on a painting of the Keatons posing awkwardly together.
• The opening of Friends has the characters goofing around a fountain in the park. The odd part isn't that the characters are all together (they almost always are in the show itself), it's that they're apparently having a late-night party in the middle of a deserted park... that has a couch!
  • The two parter "The One That Might Have Been" went to the trouble of re-recording it with the alternate versions of the characters (most obviously the straight-haired Businesswoman Phoebe, the glasses-wearing Writer Chandler, and of course, Fat Monica). And in this reality, Rachel isn't really part of the gang, but is there anyway.
• Certain later seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 showed a shot of Mike and the Bots waving to us from the viewport of the Satellite of Love. But then, MST has No Fourth Wall, so it's kind of a trope subversion (as well as a parody of a similar shot at the end of the credits for Babylon 5).
• The opening of Lizzie McGuire has the main cast playing with a ball in front of an abstract background.
• The early seasons of Roseanne followed the family around the dinner table. In later seasons the opening had to be changed due to the replacement of a main cast member. They switched from eating pizza to Chinese food to playing poker with pretzels and candy. They forfeited this in favor of a montage of time-progressed photos of each cast member as they were credited. Which lampshaded the cast change.
• The Cosby Show: The first season was a photo montage, but subsequent seasons had increasingly complicated dance numbers featuring the cast dancing to various re-arrangements of the theme song.
• Martial Law climaxed its season one opening credits with the cast walking purposefully towards the camera (which had to be redone twice — the first time because Tammy Lauren left, and the second time due to Arsenio Hall joining).
• Three's Company showed the entire cast at Santa Monica Pier (seasons 4-5) and the Los Angeles Zoo (seasons 6-8).
• Skins starting in series two has the cast playing around and having fun. Of course, so they won't be like those American teen shows they add the sex, drugs, drinking, and drama so it would be more in character for them.
• Blue Peter tried this in the late 90s... only for Richard Bacon to be suddenly sacked over a drug scandal, requiring a hasty rethink.
• The credits of The Big Bang Theory mostly are mostly a blur of images showing the universe's and humanity's development over the years, but ends with a shot (updated each season) of all of the main characters on the couch eating take-out together. While such dinner scenes were very common early in the series, they've become much less common as characters start relationships and get married. Also, in the credits version, the characters are crammed together so they all fit in one frame.
• The opening credits of Brooklyn Nine-Nine end in a Team Power Walk with all the main characters.
• The opening credits for Girl Meets World, season 3, ends with all the main characters walking together - with the show's logo projected on the ground in front of them.

Western Animation

• Family Guy mocked this at one point with their fake ad for 'Shoving Buddies', the new show coming this fall on the FOX network. It had the cast doing this, just this, for about 5 minutes.
• In Garfield and Friends, because the two featured segments (Garfield and U.S. Acres) were very strongly segregated, this was usually the only place the characters from both of them could be seen together.
• Schoolhouse Rock! very rarely had characters appear in more than one song. Despite this, VHS and DVD compilations from 1995 until at least 2002 begin by showing everyone gathering at Conjunction Junction Diner.
• Slightly subverted in Amphibia, due to it taking place during the closing credits of season 3, rather than the opening credits, but the sequence depicts Anne, Sprig, Hop Pop, and Polly messing around, dancing, and laughing together in a fantasy anime-like world.
• Bluey has her and her family doing a freeze dance game, complete with a Theme Tune Roll Call ending with Bluey as the winner of the game.

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