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Need a Good Cry? Watch Sex and the City’s Oddly Depressing Alternate Opening Credits

The opening credits of HBO’s Sex and the City have always been regarded as a cheeky sequence featuring the divisive heroine Carrie Bradshaw, with the music choice becoming as synonymous to the small-screen-rom-com community as Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme” is to cinephiles. She’s in a fabulous tulle tutu! A passing car splashes puddle water on her! Ugh, such is life in Manhattan, but she doesn’t care! But as unearthed by EW today, those iconic credits weren’t always set in stone. In fact, an alternate version was a bit more bleak — instead of an annoying splashing, Carrie would’ve gone braless in a simple blue dress, tripped when she saw her ad on a bus, and then just … walked away with a smirk. “In my mind, it was a nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show,” the show’s creator Darren Star explained, before eventually coming to his senses and keeping the tutu sequence now etched into our memories. “It was such a brilliant choice because, in a way, Carrie’s dancing through her life in New York.” Bus ad be damned.

Watch Sex and the City’s Oddly Depressing Alternate Credits