Season one times

No, I am not going to do this for all 12 seasons (and the whole series) ... really!

SEASON ONE

Longest teaser - S01E19 (Once Upon 1); shortest - S01E11 (Deathwatch)
Longest Act 1 - S01E12 (Pray Love Remember); shortest - S01E17 (One for the Money)
Longest Act 2 - S01E07 (Ways of Love); shortest - S01E04 (Samurai)
Longest Act 3 - S01E11 (Deathwatch); shortest - S01E22 (Six Kilos)
Longest Act 4 - S01E17 (One for the Money); shortest - S01E19 (Once Upon 1)
Longest Overall - S01E03 (Tiger); shortest - S01E08 (Blue Skies)

I’d forgotten how long a teaser “Once Upon a Time” Part 1 had. Probably the longest of all 4 seasons.

In the 90s syndication package, Viacom cut “Nine Dragons” Part 1 with a large part of Act 1 as a teaser, which ran over 10 minutes as I recall before the opening credits kicked in. In the modern syndication package, I think they put it back to its original form (no teaser), though still in 2 parts, of course.

There actually is a teaser for Nine Dragons, it's 30 seconds long, consisting of very brief scenes from the show (and mostly from the second half), just a few seconds each.

But what follows, with McGarrett escaping the bad guys, getting rescued, etc. -- this goes up to the point where McG is fleeing from the bad guys in the market area (and Suzie has disappeared, unlike later!) -- is just like another teaser, since it is repeated later in the show.

One interesting thing about the part where McG jumps in the water, I don't think there is any way that Jack Lord would have dived (dove?) into the filthy waters off Hong Kong and then swam to the boat where he was rescued by Suzie and her uncle. If you look carefully at this scene where JL is being pulled out of the water, you can't see anything in the background. I suspect this scene was probably done in a hotel swimming pool. You will also notice that JL's hair on top is kind of thin in one shot.

The quasi-teaser (where McG is rescued, etc.) results in the show being kind of lopsided. The part at the end where they have to track down the film which was made of McG "confessing" and then tracking down Wo Fat in a very short time frame is ridiculously time-compressed. How do they know that that one particular lab was the place where the confession film was processed? Surely there was a thriving Hong Kong film industry back then which and there would have been numerous such labs!