ABC Daytime played with the idea of doing a spin-off from its longest running soap, General Hospital, for years. One spin-off proposal from the early 1980s that was rejected was The Young Loves of General Hospital. The long-rumored GH spin-off finally became a reality on Sunday night June 1, 1997 with the primetime movie-of-the-week launch of Port Charles, a serial focusing on a group of young resident interns working at General Hospital.
The opening visual sequence, designed by Aerodrome Pictures, begins and ends with a silhouetted shot of a group of young doctors walking towards us down a bright hospital corridor. Interspersed throughout are vignetted video portraits of each cast member, accompanied by and crossfaded with an action shot featuring that character from an actual episode.
The title of the show is in an unusual all-lowercase treatment with the word "port" in italics and the word "charles" in regular Garamound type.
Marty Davich composed the show's theme song, a briskly paced, piano-dominated piece in D-minor.
During its first two years on the air, Port Charles' end credits were in virtually the same format as those of its mother show, General Hospital. Separate credit cards accompanied stills from that day's episode. However, unlike General Hospital, Port Charles lists the cast members in alphabetical order. In September 1999, ABC Network broadcasts of PC adopted the generic format of "squeezed" yellow and black credits on one side of the screen and a network promo on the other. However, the SoapNet cable rebroadcasts still feature the 1997 to 1999 end credit style.
ABC's Official Port Charles Site