here is a differnt intro for diff rent strokes i found looks like it from italy kind intresting take look



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58k5-dqtNMk&feature=related

why bother calling it "Arnold" why the song is clearly still singing the theme song? :lol:

I live in Italy.
Well yes ... it's the actual starting open sequence for all italian "Diff'rent Strokes" seasons, including the seasons where Dana Plato was replaced by Cooksey and Carter. Main clips in the sequence was taken from first season 4 episodes, other few pictures were taken from the episode "The hitchhickers" from season 6. This makes the opening sequence not realistic and definitely not interesting for a good DS fan. This is the reason I replaced the italian opening sequence with the original one after I recorded the dubbed italian episodes for my collection.

Unfortunately, the ending credits was almost totally removed in the italian version, before the applause and before the "Directed By" label, oftenly destroying last episode scene. Also the closing sequence was replaced by a bad, small version of opening sequence with little clips on the right and some italian credits on the left, reporting, wrongly, the same director (Gerren Keith) and writer name (Gordon Mitchell) for each episode. To the end, the italian company working on the italian post-production was reported and theme song suddenly interrupted.

The series was called "Arnold" in Italy, since 1981, because someone in the italian broadcasting networks think Arnold was the more attractive character in the series and especially suitable for very young people. Until 1986, when the season 6 was aired in Italy, the original opening sequence was used with the "Arnold" label replacing the Diff'rent Strokes starting logo only. After 1988, in all following reruns and seasons 7-8 airings, the original sequences was removed. According to what my uncle reminds, the italian first seasons aired in the first 80s were in very poor quality, so, maybe, italian tv networks has bought a new master copy again (the actual quality is very DVD-ish) and wanted to rebuild all opening and closing sequences.

At least, italian networks use to change opening video sequence often for not-italian TV series and replace them with a self-made sequence, even more than once during the reruns, without changing the theme song. Please don't ask me why but I never considered it as a good idea.

Anny Carano