March Madness March of the Day: "Prelude and Main Title" from Superman by John Williams

The best person to describe the most influential (and most imitated) superhero movie theme ever would be the man who wrote it.

"Although commonly called a march, Williams himself did not consider it such at the time of its creation. 'I put 'Superman March' on it perhaps after the fact in an arrangement done for performance. Certainly it was not a march per se in my mind when doing it for the film. I think what that says about it is that it has a certain tempo, and a certain forward motion to it in its rhythmic design that ultimately had become a march. We're resolved to the fact that it became a kind of march, although you wouldn't strictly march to it, I don't think... But that's one aspect of it that seemed to me to be needing to be there, that is, the notion of a certain tempo and drive and energy and a hero's theme... At the time we were doing it, certainly I couldn't have predicted that people would remember it. But if, as in any film, if I or another colleague can create a melodic identification for a character or a film that sticks, that connects with people and represents the film to them--I'll just put it this way, it represents one of the great opportunities that a composer can have in doing a film."

--from the liner notes of the Film Score Monthly label's enormongous Superman: The Music box set