"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "A Party for Tarzan"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



When The Venture Bros. pulled the in medias res trick--an overused storytelling device Rick and Morty, another equally great animated comedy from Team Venture's home network of Adult Swim, made fun of a few months ago--only 25 seconds into "A Party for Tarzan," I was worried. "No! Not you too, Astrobase Go," I thought to myself.

Fortunately, the episode's deployment of in medias res turned out to be a parody of Martin Scorsese's in medias res moments from the opening title sequences of GoodFellas and Casino (as well as Raging Bull). I almost forgot that Scorsese actually did this, decades before Morty Smith would lose his mind on the Purge planet, when an aspiring screenwriter on that planet pissed Morty off by starting his story at the point where it got interesting instead of where its timeframe actually began.

Set during a night when Gary, who doesn't enjoy the homicidal part of henching, reluctantly executes an arch in the Pine Barrens as dirty work and Dr. Mrs. the Monarch experiences some similar hesitation while Wide Wale gives her the chance to pull the trigger on the man she thinks is the supervillain-killing Blue Morpho, "A Party for Tarzan" ranks up there with Community's "Contemporary American Poultry" episode and Mr. Show's hilarious "Pallies" sketch as an entertaining Scorsese parody. "Pallies" was actually more of a parody of the Bill the Butcher-esque treatment commercial TV has subjected all of Scorsese's R-rated movies to than a parody of the director's signature filmmaking techniques, but it's still a great little sketch about the violence of GoodFellas.



"A Party for Tarzan," the penultimate episode of The Venture Bros.' sixth season, even has in common with "Pallies" the brief presence of Paul F. Tompkins. The Mr. Show alum reprises his role from earlier this season as the original Morpho, whose 1973 master plan of disguising himself as the then-closeted Billie Jean King and nakedly seducing Dr. Z (Jackson Publick) into relinquishing a priceless statuette known as the Jade Dragon (while somehow tucking in his dick like Buffalo Bill)--which is detailed in a flashback-within-a-flashback--is definitely something you would never have seen on The Green Hornet.

If you're going to give Patrick Warburton and Mike Sinterniklaas an entire episode off from voicing Brock and Dean, respectively, you better damn well make the episode worthwhile. The Scorsesean flashback gimmick Doc Hammer went with for the episode he scripted--perhaps to compensate for the lack of Warburton and Sinterniklaas--could have turned out to be annoying, like it would have probably been in the hands of some lesser writer whose go-to Scorsese references are limited to Raging Bull and GoodFellas. But luckily, the gimmick works. When Hammer's making fun of Scorsese's overreliance on "Gimme Shelter" instead of recreating Joe Pesci's most profane lines from GoodFellas and Casino, that's how you know "A Party for Tarzan" is a solid Scorsese spoof. The Stones and blues music soundalikes Venture Bros. composer J.G. Thirlwell came up with in place of too-pricey-to-clear Scorsese movie soundtrack cuts like "Gimme Shelter" or "Mannish Boy" are funnier than using the actual songs themselves.

Between the references to Scorsese's 1987 video for Michael Jackson's "Bad" during "It Happening One Night" and the homages to Scorsese's documentary narration-inspired style throughout "A Party for Tarzan," Publick and Hammer must have revisited much of Scorsese's work while looking for inspiration for the New York-based sixth season and planning the whole season out. Doing that must have given Publick and Hammer a renewed appreciation for the legendary New York director whose name is interestingly one of the most frequently misspelled, even by filmmakers who claim to be fans of his work.

Air grafted a nifty new score onto the silent classic A Trip to the Moon, or as it's known to your brain-damaged little brother who gets all his historical facts from Wikipedia, that movie that ripped off the "Tonight Tonight" video

When a rare hand-colored print of Georges Méliès' Jules Verne-inspired 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon was meticulously restored and shown for the first time at Cannes in 2011, the cleaned-up imagery wasn't the only upgrade A Trip to the Moon received. The restored print also contained a new original score provided by the French electronica duo Air of "Surfing on a Rocket" and Virgin Suicides score fame.

Air

Air members Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel have said that they found the restored Trip to the Moon to be a more liberating film project than The Virgin Suicides. "I don’t think we like doing soundtracks... We are not film composers. It’s a really intense job," said Godin to IFC. "You can’t go on tour, you are at the service of someone, and you are not the boss. You have no freedom. But on this project we were completely free. Basically we were writing the music the day before Cannes, so no one could say a word about it. It was a blank screen. We could do whatever we wanted."

The Trip to the Moon score sounds as futuristic and whimsical as past Air tracks like "Kelly Watch the Stars," "Sexy Boy," "Mer Du Japon" and the Alessandro Alessandroni whistle-inspired "Alpha Beta Gaga." But there's a timelessness to this Trip to the Moon score that makes it a great fit with Méliès' surreal lo-fi visuals, which are an integral part of Martin Scorsese's Méliès tribute Hugo(*) and were famously referenced 15 years before by the husband-and-wife duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris in the steampunky video they directed for The Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight Tonight."



Earlier this week, Godin and Dunckel released their Trip to the Moon themes on the Le Voyage Dans La Lune album from Astralwerks. Because the Méliès film is only 14 minutes long, the release expands upon Air's score material and adds guest vocals by the Brooklyn trio Au Revoir Simone and Victoria Legrand from the Baltimore duo Beach House (the album is twice the length of the restored film, which Astralwerks has also included in its entirety in mp4 form on the release).

The album's Legrand-sung highlight, "Seven Stars," isn't part of the restored film. But like much of the rest of the album, "Seven Stars" is a nice and richly crafted companion piece to the most famous "astronauts fly to moon and commit genocide by poking most of moon's native population with their umbrellas" story ever told.

CBS Sunday Morning's Trip to the Moon-style sun logo for a recent segment about Hugo (Photo source: The Faces of Sunday Morning)

(*) Several years ago, I wrote down an idea for a fantasy movie script that would have presented an alternate history in which there was a top-secret trip to the moon at the turn of the century, and one of the astronauts was Méliès, who, to me, is a fascinating figure and a silent-era genius, even though his films contain yellowface and unseemly French lady armpit hair. This script would have shown how his lunar experiences ended up being the actual inspiration for A Trip to the Moon, even though Méliès would embellish (or simplify) elements of his lunar experiences because real life is far less fanciful (or cost-effective) than the universe Méliès created in his films. I wanted the moon to have facial features like it did in Méliès' film, but this planetoid-sized creature was going to be depicted through modern effects technology and appear as large and craggy as the actual moon. This script idea never went past being an idea on a napkin, or as some people like to call it, a Word document. But Brian Selznick's 2007 graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Scorsese's Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Selznick book have told a better story about Méliès than whatever I envisioned in my head.

A track-by-track rundown of the current "New Cue Revue" playlist on A Fistful of Soundtracks

Every Wednesday at 10am and 4pm and every Friday at 11am, A Fistful of Soundtracks streams the most recent additions to the station's "Assorted Fistful" library (or in the case of Akon & Hamskia Iyer's "Chammak Challo," the "Chai Noon" library) for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's what's currently on the "New Cue Revue" playlist.

1. Akon & Hamsika Iyer, "Chammak Challo" (from Ra.One)
Ever since it was announced in 2010 that R&B artist Akon, best known for "Smack That," "I Wanna Love You" and the hilarious Lonely Island/SNL digital short "I Just Had Sex," was lending his pipes to an original song for a Bollywood film (like another non-Indian singer, Kylie Minogue, had done for the imaginatively titled 2009 Into the Blue clone Blue), I've been dying to hear the Akon track. The end result, "Chammak Challo" from Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan's recently released superhero movie Ra.One, finally dropped in September and is a smash hit in India. (In this latest round of one of my favorite games, Guess the American Movie or TV Show That This Bollywood Film Is a Bizarre Clone Of, Ra.One, which features Khan in the dual role of a dorky video game designer and a heroic character from his game who enters the real world, appears to be a clone of the largely forgotten '80s superhero show Automan.)

Akon acquits himself nicely as he alternates between English and Hindi during "Chammak Challo" (the song title is basically "nice-looking shawty" in Hindi slang). The catchy "Chammak Challo" proves that it's much better when Bollywood soundtrack composers enlist actual R&B or rap artists from America to do their thing on their soundtracks than when they attempt to rap or ape current American R&B trends on their own. The latter has led to several theme tunes that are as painful-sounding as the time when Prince stopped being a hater of hip-hop and attempted to incorporate rap into his Diamonds and Pearls album--for instance, go YouTube "Desi Boyz." Or maybe you're better off if you don't.



2. Howard Shore, "The Thief" (from Hugo)
The former SNL bandleader and Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy composer nicely apes the rhythms of a clock for Martin Scorsese's clock imagery-filled tribute to silent-era filmmakers like Georges Méliès (played during Hugo by Ben Kingsley).

3. Alberto Iglesias, "George Smiley" (from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
The lonely trumpet during Alberto Iglesias' effective score for the latest screen adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy announces that "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here."

4. Mike Skinner, "Fernando's Theme" (from The Inbetweeners Movie)
British rapper Mike Skinner has retired his stage name The Streets and entered the world of film scoring with his original music for the film version of The Inbetweeners, the Britcom about a group of Superbad-style dorky teens whose anthem would be the aforementioned "I Just Had Sex." The clubby "Fernando's Theme" is the best example of "Wow, I never knew this pasty white guy had a Latin side and maybe he should express it more often" since Michael Giacchino wrote the awesome "Spanish Heist" for the TV series Alias.

5. Alan Silvestri, "Howling Commando's Montage" (from Captain America: The First Avenger)
This cue accompanies a sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger that's a bit too short: a montage of Cap on his missions with the Howling Commandos. Will the Captain America sequel be a flashback to one of those missions with the Howling Commandos that The First Avenger glossed over? As someone who wanted to see more Howling Commando scenes in the film, I hope so.

6. Quincy Jones featuring Little Richard, "Money Runner/Money Is (Medley)" (from $ [Dollars])
As I've said before, say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby. This funky theme from the 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn heist flick $ (Dollars) would fit right in with the Occupy era, except "Inflation in the nation don't bother me" would have to be changed to "Recession in the nation don't bother me."

7. Ludovic Bource, "1927 A Russian Affair" (from The Artist)
After the arrivals of The Artist and Hugo, is silent cinema making a comeback? This better not mean a return to white people stealing Asian roles from Asian perform... d'oh!