‘Cheers’ opening remade with scenes from gay bars

What if the classic sitcom Cheers was about Sam and Dan instead of Sam and Diane? And what if Norm and Cliff were a couple and Frasier actually was gay?

Singer-songwriter K Anderson doesn’t attempt to rewrite the characters who inhabited the bar on that show but he has recreated its iconic opening credits and come up with something powerful and new.

The unchanged lyrics, which include ‘you want to go where people know, people are all the same,’ are given added poignancy in light of the lives lost at Pulse nightclub in Orlando last month.

Anderson writes of his video: ‘This has been ready to go for a while, but then Orlando happened, and then Brexit happened, and then the world continued to feel as though it was falling apart, and I didn’t feel much like sharing.’

Until now.

Realizing the Cheers theme could also describe the safety and solace found by outsiders in a gay bar,. Anderson went digging for vintage photos of gay bars, clubs and parties in order to recreate the opening credits.

‘It was hard!’ he writes. ‘There are not that many old photos out there of people in gay bars unless they are rioting out the front!’

But he managed and what you find in this video is a collection of photos through time, from Berlin and Paris in the 1930s, to the Mattachine Society, to Stonewall, to the disco craze of the 1970s.