Songfacts®:

• The Ventures recorded the instrumental theme for the long-running police procedural drama (1968-1980) about detectives Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) and Dan "Danno" Williams (James MacArthur) who worked the Hawaiian islands beat. It was composed by Morton Stevens, who started out as an arranger/conductor for Sammy Davis Jr. and became director of music for CBS on the West Coast. Aside from Hawaii Five-O, he also composed music for popular dramas like Police Woman and Gunsmoke.
• The series and its theme song were resurrected for the 2010 reboot of the show, starring Alex O'Loughlin as McGarrett and Scott Caan as Williams. The Ventures recorded a fresh take of the song for the new series, but the show's music director rejected it in favor of a synthesized version.
  
  That didn't fly with the public, so he returned to the Ventures... sort of. The group's co-founder Don Wilson explained on The Bob Rivers Show: "After they got bad press on the synthesizer version, they copied our version just right down to the tee. So we're not playing it on there... [we're] getting ripped off."
• The Australian rock band Radio Birdman recorded a song called "Aloha Steve And Danno" in 1977 that incorporated the Hawaii Five-O theme in the middle instrumental break and referenced the show in the lyric. Morton Stevens was given half the songwriting credit, by mutual agreement.
• Sammy Davis Jr. and Don Ho each performed vocal versions of the theme - Davis with "You Can Count on Me" and Ho with the ballad "You Can Come with Me."
• This song also became a hit on the UK dance floors as the late-'60s Mod scene gave way to Northern Soul. Dubbed "a genre built from failures," the music and dance movement embraced lesser-known black American Soul artists who copied the early Motown sound, but eventually included any uptempo numbers with heavy beats.
• This was the last song with the word "Hawaii" in it to make the Hot 100. America had a fascination with Hawaiian culture in the '50s and '60s that was reflected in movies, TV shows and music. By the '70s, the populace of the lower 48 seemed less enamored - Joni Mitchell even wrote about the commercialization of the island in her song "Big Yellow Taxi."
  
  In the decade preceding Hawaii Five-O, there were five charting hits that mention the state, four of which were instrumentals:
  
  "Blue Hawaii" by Billy Vaughn (#37, 1959)
  "Hawaiian War Chant" by Billy Vaughn (#89, 1959)
  "Hawaii Tattoo" by The Waikikis (#33, 1965)
  "Hawaii Honeymoon" by The Waikikis (#91, 1965)
  
  The lone vocal hit was "The Hawaiian Wedding Song (Ke Kali Nei Au)" by Andy Williams (#11, 1959).
• The subtle percussive accent in the mix that sounds like a rattle is the vibraslap, an instrument that was invented just a year earlier and featured prominently in the hit "Green Tambourine" by The Lemon Pipers. Consisting of a wooden ball attached to a hollow box of metal pins, it was made to approximate the sound of a jawbone, a teeth-rattling instrument made from the dried jawbone of an animal, often a donkey or horse.