I never got to see Prince perform live. But every time the eccentric musical genius and consummate guitarist performed live on TV (instead of lip-syncing on TV, aside from earlier appearances on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand), it was a can't-miss event, even whenever I had to sit through a bunch of unfunny SNL sketches just to watch that SNL episode's purple-loving musical guest, who died yesterday at the too-young age of 57.
Sure, it would have been dope to attend a Prince concert or better yet, rock out to one of his even more legendary surprise sets inside smaller and more intimate venues. But I didn't have to check out Prince live to know that he was tremendously skilled when it came to both putting on a show and making a song (whether it was one of his own songs or another artist's) sound even more alive and vibrant than the original recording of it, especially when he shredded on his electric guitar like there's no tomorrow. On stage, nothing compares to Prince.
Inside both my MacBook and my phone, I have a good-quality mp3 of a terrific Prince cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from Coachella 2008 that I've never removed. Prince, who hated encountering footage of his music he had no control over, assigned one of his techie goons to wipe out all traces of his live "Creep" cover. That goon clearly sucked at attempting to wipe them all out.
I love Prince's epic take on "Creep" more than Radiohead's original version. Even Thom Yorke himself agrees that Prince improved upon "Creep."
The "Danzón No. 2" sequence from Mozart in the Jungle
"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts that appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie--or that I never encountered a certain popular piece of music--until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.
When Mozart in the Jungle, the Amazon original series about the New York classical music world, took home Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy for Gael García Bernal--as unorthodox conductor Rodrigo de Souza--at the Golden Globes earlier this year on January 10, Amazon celebrated its show's Golden Globe wins by allowing viewers who don't subscribe to Amazon Prime to stream for free every Mozart in the Jungle episode for only one day on January 17. I really wanted to see if Mozart in the Jungle got any better after its so-so pilot, which I watched for free on Amazon during Amazon pilot season a year before (I don't subscribe to Amazon Prime because it's too expensive for my blood), so I had to kiss the whole Sunday goodbye and try to stream Mozart in the Jungle's entire run before it turned back into a pumpkin at midnight.
Streaming two whole seasons in one Sunday is difficult to accomplish, especially when you're like me and you don't believe in binge-watching. I think it's a terrible way to savor scripted TV--I believe in taking my time when it comes to watching shows--and I also don't like to call it binge-watching because that word makes the act of TV-watching sound disgusting and Mr. Creosote-ish. Streaming two seasons in one Sunday is also difficult when you're the kind of viewer who can get fidgety after only two hours of marathoning a show and Sunday isn't the best day to be marathoning the entire lifespan of a show because after much procrastination, Sunday usually ends up being the day when you have to go replenish your fridge with groceries or else you're screwed for the next few days. Despite those obstacles, I was able to get as far as the third-to-last episode of the second season before Mozart in the Jungle turned back into a pumpkin.
As Rodrigo, the mercurial artistic soul whom aspiring oboist Hailey Rutledge (Lola Kirke) falls in love with and whom Mozart in the Jungle creators Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's cousin) and Alex Timbers loosely based on Venezuelan rock-star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Bernal definitely deserved that Golden Globe. At times, Mozart in the Jungle threatens to turn into Entourage-y lifestyle porn, but it's neither as douchey as Entourage nor as unconvincing in its attempts to establish why its fictional central figure is an A-list star. I never could buy that the rather boring-ass Vincent Chase is a movie star--a CW star maybe, but not the 1997-ish DiCaprio type Entourage frequently hyped up Vinnie to be--whereas thanks to the amount of time Mozart in the Jungle spends on Rodrigo's creative process, as well as the vitality and warmth Bernal brings to Rodrigo, you understand why Rodrigo is such a highly regarded conductor and why every musician in the fictional New York Symphony would take a bullet for him.
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!
Remember Melanie Hutsell? She's the SNL featured player-turned-regular who never really gelled on the show back in the '90s and whose sole highlight was a killer Jan Brady impression she brought over from her time as a cast member of The Real Live Brady Bunch, the '90s stage show that restaged Brady Bunch scripts word-for-word. Like with so many other sketch comics who failed to blow up on SNL, Studio 8H just wasn't the right venue for Hutsell. And then like another short-lived female SNL featured player, Casual star Michaela Watkins, Hutsell resurfaced on the Amazon show Transparent, where she stole one scene (while Watkins has managed to steal two whole Transparent episodes).
It's one of the most satisfying scenes during the largely downbeat second season of Transparent (created and showrun, by the way, by Jill Soloway, who happens to be another Real Live Brady Bunch alum), and the scene made me think, "Wow, this is the same lady whose dorky dance moves forever ruined Van Morrison's 'Moondance' in that unfunny SNL 'Moondance' sketch? She's funnier here." On Transparent, Hutsell plays a newly outed lesbian mom at the school attended by the kids of self-absorbed, perpetually unhappy Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker). Hutsell's perceptive character bluntly tells Sarah the words that she, a Pfefferman as selfish as the other Pfeffermans, needed to hear this whole time: "Can I just, like, say something to you and just try to help you out a little bit maybe? Nobody cares about what you do. I mean, I know you think they care, but they don't. You know, people walking around at our school, they're mostly thinking about carpools and play dates and homework..."
The Venture Bros. has a few things in common with Transparent, like the gender fluidity of some of the Ventureverse characters and the way you sometimes root for Dean to get as far away from Dr. Venture as possible (which Brock temporarily did when he quit the OSI and moved out of the Venture Compound) in order to be his own man and live a normal life. It's similar to how you root for Rabbi Raquel (Kathryn Hahn) and Syd (Carrie Brownstein) to get as far away as possible from Josh (Jay Duplass), Sarah's younger brother, and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), Sarah and Josh's little sister, respectively, because Rabbi Raquel and Syd are such decent, normal people who don't need to be made miserable by their respective lover's insufferable bullshit.
The animated show is also as sharp an exploration of narcissism as Transparent. A minor character in the Doc Hammer-scripted "Rapacity in Blue" experiences with the Monarch a moment just like the Hutsell/Landecker scene from Transparent. Manolo (Hal Lublin) is a Latino handyman who's involved with renovating the Monarch's childhood house. Though his dialogue has largely been unremarkable, "Your wife no home"-type shit, we get a hint that Manolo has a normal, well-adjusted (and apparently, '90s sitcom-watching) life outside the craziness of the Monarch's home when--after having to endure the Monarch's endless chattering about his indecision over suiting up as his deceased socialite dad's recently unearthed alter ego of the Blue Morpho--he basically tells the Monarch he's not the center of the universe in a kind-of-polite-but-not-really way that's unmistakably Hammer.
"I don't really care about this" are words that immediately won me over onto Manolo's side, just like how "Nobody cares about what you do" made me take notice of Jan Brady again.
I've stayed away from Asian Twitter ever since two different camps within Asian Twitter came to blows over #CancelColbert--the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional TV character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown's choice to become a single mom--and all that arguing between Asian Americans over #CancelColbert made me want to stick my head in the oven, so I've spent most of my lurking time on Twitter over on Black Twitter. Does the fourth half of that last sentence make any sense? Shit, it probably doesn't.
Black Twitter is sometimes a more enjoyable place to be than any other part of Twitter, mainly because of Desus Nice's consistently funny tweets about either hip-hop, sports, white people's bullshit or an America where "President Trump starts WW3 with Mexico and China." Desus has parlayed his 140-characters-and-less wit into both a career of writing for comedy shows on MTV2 and a popular, now-defunct comedic webseries with "all-caps rap reviewer" The Kid Mero that returned to the Internet earlier this month in the form of the newly launched podcast Bodega Boys. Emmy night and the following day are interesting examples of the differences in trending topics between Black Twitter and White Twitter, or as I like to call it, Facebook.
So Black Twitter has been all about the new Drake/Future mixtape, the enthusiasm over Uzo Aduba, Regina King and Viola Davis all winning Emmys for acting and black viewers' frustrations over a Twitter rant about Davis' candid and rousing Emmy acceptance speech that was posted and quickly deleted by a drunken white actress from General Hospital. Black Twitter shouldn't be surprised that the lady from General Hospital would post racist opinions about Davis' Emmy win for her role on How to Get Away with Murder: she's a Cassadine. Of course she would say such things.
How do I know all this shit about the Cassadines? I used to watch General Hospital in between UC Santa Cruz classes. I lived in a nice off-campus apartment building where none of the neighbors on my floor were weed dealers or were into sharing their weed, so I never really was heavily into weed like most other UCSC students. That also meant that when I wanted a good laugh at about 2pm before I'd slink back to class or the campus paper, I was too lazy to go score some weed downtown. Instead I would get a couple of good laughs at 2pm by just switching on General Hospital to chuckle over either three things: the show's G-rated and overly romanticized portrayal of the Mafia, two or three years before The Sopranos premiered and its popularity caused General Hospital to be completely changed into Sopranos lite; the fact that every outdoor conversation at night would take place on the same exact foggy Port Charles dock set; or one of Anthony Geary's genuinely funny and often unscripted one-liners during the feud between the evil Cassadines and the slightly less evil Spencers. That's how I know who the Cassadines are.
Anyway, while those are the trending topics on Black Twitter, White Twitter is preoccupied with much weirder things: viral footage of a subway rat carrying a slice of pizza (apparently he's got a few ninja turtles he needs to feed), gossip over David Cameron once inserting his dick into a dead pig as if he were in an episode of Black Mirror and a photo of Christina Ricci dressed up as Morticia Addams, the mother of Wednesday, the character Ricci charmingly brought to life in the two Addams Family movies. Yeah, that's white people in a nutshell.
Wait a minute. [KRS-One voice.] Rewind. Someone posted a pic of Ricci as Morticia? Has that person been reading my mind lately and glimpsing a hot fantasy I once had about present-day Ricci in a Morticia outfit? I'm no Goth, but I would love to see Ricci play Morticia in an Addams Family reboot. Also, why is the Photoshopping job on that Tumblr pic kind of shitty, and why does it remind me of Lena Headey's face getting poorly grafted onto her body double during Cersei's walk of shame? How's it possible that there are people who were actually convinced the photo is real?
Ricci most recently starred as Lizzie Borden in both a Lifetime movie and a short-lived Lifetime show. An ideal future role for her would have to be Morticia or a grown-up Wednesday. The Addams Family, the show that was based on the only New Yorker cartoons that are worth a damn, has already been rebooted three different times in live action and once in animation (as well as turned into a Broadway musical starring Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia and Nathan Lane as Gomez). I hate most reboots, and the unwatchability and suckitude of the last two live-action Addams projects are a good reason why I dislike most of them (the Addamses are too big to be in something as small as a chintzy direct-to-video movie). But it's not surprising why a certain segment of Hollywood keeps wanting to resuscitate the Addams fam.
The Charles Addams characters' brand of dark humor--they're misfits mocking the lily-white and squeaky-clean suburbia of '50s and '60s sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and then later on during the era of the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, America as envisioned by those who worshiped the Bush Sr. Administration--is timeless and always appealing, especially to misfits and outcasts who don't care for how dull, unpleasant and, well, hateful that kind of suburbia or America can be. At a time when a hatemonger like Donald Trump is trying to stoke the racist anger of that kind of America, maybe we need the Addamses on the screen again to take that America down and shoot arrows at it a la Wednesday and Pugsley during that Thanksgiving play they rewrote in Addams Family Values.
All an Addams reboot needs besides Ricci are a director who's incredibly focused--and doesn't let the art direction become the only good thing about the movie but still manages to infuse a strong visual sense--and a writer who's as sharp as Paul Rudnick, a script doctor on the first Addams Family flick and the sole credited writer of Addams Family Values, the sequel that was a perfect marriage of quip writer and teen performer delivering those quips (Rudnick/Ricci). Shit, on second thought, they should just bring Rudnick back, unless he'd rather stick to ghostwriting the film reviews of Libby Gelman-Waxner.
I want more than just Ricci channeling Morticia on the red carpet, man. I'd like another Rudnick-penned Addams movie, and I'd like her to be an Addams again. Ricci may have scared away Lifetime viewers while wielding Lizzie Borden's ax, but as an Addams wielding an ax, she'd definitely get our attention again.
Marc Shaiman's "The Tango," the instrumental highlight of Addams Family Values, isn't currently in rotation on AFOS (it was removed from rotation in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space), but it ought to be.
Like I've said before, I love it when the worlds of film or TV score music and hip-hop collide. One of my favorite of those collisions is the work of the late Japanese producer Nujabes (pronounced "noo-jah-bess") as a co-composer for Shinichiro Watanabe's classic 2004-05 animated show Samurai Champloo, an intentionally anachronistic period piece full of samurai who display breakdancing fighting styles and Edo-period Japanese youth who are fond of either beatboxing or creating graffiti art.
Just like J Dilla, another beloved and distinctive producer whose death in the late '00s is still being mourned by many in the hip-hop community, Jun Seba (Nujabes is an anagram of his name), the virtuoso beatmaker and founder of his own indie label Hydeout Productions, has gained more fans posthumously than before his death from a car accident in 2009, mostly due to Samurai Champloo. Nujabes' instrumentals were pitch-perfect for Champloo (by the way, "champloo," if you've ever wondered, is the Westernized spelling of "chanpuru," a word that means "something mixed" and is also the name of an Okinawan stir-fry dish that mixes tofu with meat and bitter melon or other ingredients). The music by Nujabes, Fat Jon, Tsutchie and Force of Nature (the duo of DJ Kent and KZA) alternated between playful and contemplative, like the show itself, which alternated between raucous action comedy and the existential drama that was found in the tortured pasts of its three principal characters: unemployed rival swordsmen Mugen and Jin and their teenage charge Fuu, a mismatched trio in the mold of Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop trio of Spike, Jet and Faye.
(The cues during FUNimation's clip from "Tempestuous Temperaments," Champloo's first episode, are "Loading Zone" and "Silver Children," both by Force of Nature.)
"Plangent piano lines dominated, sometimes ornamented by flute or soprano saxophone, with a mood that hovered between melancholy and uplifting without ever tipping over into schmaltz," wrote James Hadfield about the Nujabes sound in his recent Japan Times piece about both Nujabes and frequent collaborators like Japanese rapper Shing02, whose bars grace Champloo's Nujabes-produced opening title theme "Battlecry" ("Some fight, some bleed/Sunup to sundown/The sons of a battlecry"). My favorite part of the Japan Times piece on Nujabes has to be the vivid glimpse into Nujabes' time as a persnickety, Rob Gordon-esque record shop owner in '90s Shibuya: "Sometimes the owner's personal tastes trumped commercial considerations: When Jay-Z released crossover hit 'Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)' in 1998, Seba only stocked a few copies because he didn't like the song."
Nujabes' schmaltz-free and Annie-free contributions to Champloo can be heard during the AFOS blocks "Beat Box," "Brokedown Merry Go-Round" and "AFOS Prime," as well as during a terrifically assembled mix of Nujabes instrumentals by L.A.'s Daddy Kev, which he dropped in honor of Nujabes, on the fifth anniversary of his death on February 26. The new mix contains the Champloo instrumentals "A Space in Air" (starting at 0:00), "Haiku" (at 7:51), "The Space Between Two World" (at 13:58), "Aruarian Dance" (at 21:18 and my personal all-time favorite Nujabes beat) and "Mystline" (at 50:32).
Champloo's entire run can be streamed on either FUNimation, its YouTube channel or Netflix, where you can glimpse how the music of Nujabes, Fat Jon, Tsutchie and Force of Nature is so integral to Champloo that it's like a fourth character on the show (a 2012 essay on Champloo by the hip-hop site The Find notes that the rise in Nujabes' international popularity is "partially because of careless teenagers on YouTube incorrectly crediting him with just about every track on the show, while the most often featured musician on the show and most responsible for the overall musical texture, Tsutchie, would end up criminally ignored"). But if you've never watched Champloo and you're unfamiliar with Nujabes' music, Daddy Kev's "Beyond" tribute mix is an ideal introduction to his music.
My first encounter with the Nujabes sound was a bizarre one: it wasn't through Champloo but through a remix of Amerie's "1 Thing," which made the rounds of the blogosphere back in 2005 for brilliantly mashing up "1 Thing" with Nujabes. The remix was the work of an L.A. remixer and DJ named Siik, whose bizarrely named mixes are among my favorites. Siik's "I Don't Even Like Coffee" receives frequent MacBook airplay from me, simply for the inclusion of the underrated, Dilla-produced A Tribe Called Quest track "Like It Like That."
It wasn't until nearly a decade after the "1 Thing" remix--while watching all of Champloo for the first time, in subtitled form and online, and then becoming such a Nujabes fan that my older brother got me a Hydeout compilation last Christmas--when I realized the instrumental Siik chose for his "1 Thing" remix, "Aruarian Dance," came from Champloo. That made me like Siik's remix even more. And now, since it's such a great sampler of Nujabes instrumentals, Daddy Kev's "Beyond" tribute mix joins the likes of the "1 Thing" remix and "I Don't Even Like Coffee" as something I'll frequently vibe to on my MacBook, sunup to sundown.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
What I wrote about Captain America: The First Avenger here on the AFOS blog back in 2012:
I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."
That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."
In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.
The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.
In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."
The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.
The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.
Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)
Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.
What I think about The First Avenger in 2015:
It holds up. Hayley Atwell's breakout performance as Agent Carter is one of the highlights of The First Avenger, and I'm glad for the continual presence of Atwell's character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (this week's solid two-hour premiere of Atwell's Agent Carter miniseries on ABC makes me wish for Agent Carter to become a regular series, although I'd prefer it to be in the eight-episodes-per-season format that's closer to British TV, instead of the increasingly outdated and unwieldy 22-a-season format). But the Winter Soldier sequel, which drew inspiration from much of the acclaimed Brubaker revamp of the Captain America comics, is even more impressive than The First Avenger as a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, showing "some surprising depth in its depiction of an unchecked intelligence agency and a U.S. government that executes enemies without trial," as Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate. Hail HYDRA fighta.
Selections from the Captain America: The First Avenger score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."
Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.
"There's pretty much literally nothing that you can't do in an episode of Rick and Morty," said Dan Harmon in a lengthy but fascinating discussion with Alan Sepinwall this week about the pleasures of co-creating Rick and Morty with Justin Roiland while he was separated from Community during its "gas leak year." "It was a beautiful, beautiful net to fall into off of the high wire that was Community."
The plot of Rick's A-story in "Something Ricked This Way Comes" epitomizes this limitlessness that Harmon loves being able to get away with doing on Rick and Morty and is unable to accomplish on Community for many reasons, whether it's because of the limitations of live action or because the Community universe is far more grounded than the Rick and Morty universe(s). In the A-story of "Something Ricked," Rick gets to take on the Devil himself (special guest star Alfred Molina), and in the A-story's best joke, this jaded man of science is never intimidated by Satan and his magic and is always whupping Satan's devious ass. That's how badass Rick is in this episode. The Devil can't outwit Rick's genius. "I may be the Devil, but your grandfather is the Devil," groans an exasperated Satan after attempting to hang himself because he can't take anymore of Rick.
At the start of "Something Ricked" (written by Mike McMahan), Satan's scheme is to run a little store called Needful Things (a reference to the Stephen King novel of the same name), where, under the name of Mr. Needful, he gives away for free to customers mysterious knickknacks that provide them with whatever they desire but also curses them. The items range from a typewriter that generates best-selling murder mysteries but makes the murders happen in real life to aftershave that makes men like Mr. Goldenfold (Brandon Johnson), Morty's math teacher, irresistible to women but causes them to be impotent.
If these items sound like plots from old sci-fi/horror anthology shows (the typewriter is reminiscent of the word processor that can rewrite reality in the Tales from the Darkside adaptation of King's "Word Processor of the Gods" short story), that's exactly what "Something Ricked" is parodying. As someone who grew up watching the original Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories and both versions of The Outer Limits (the "Alyssa Milano gets possessed by an alien entity and turns nympho" episode was, to my teenage self, the greatest Outer Limits of all time), I found Rick's nonchalant attitude towards the Devil, a frequent presence on sci-fi/horror anthology shows, to be tons of fun. Thanks to what I presume is his familiarity with black magic and otherworldly science from his interdimensional adventures, Rick is way ahead of the rest of the town and correctly guesses that Summer's boss at her new job in the store is the Devil only two and a half minutes into the episode. Rick goes back to his garage lab and builds a tricorder-like device that, as he tells Mr. Needful, "detects and catalogs all your Twilight Zone/Ray Bradbury/Friday the 13th: The Series voodoo crap magic."
If Rick built a portal gun that allowed him to enter fictional realities and then intervene in anthology show episodes (or Bradbury stories) about haunted objects like he does with the customers' curses throughout "Something Ricked," those episodes would end up being 25 minutes shorter (and those Bradbury stories would be like two pages long). As entertaining as Rick's needling of the Devil and his mocking attitude towards sci-fi anthology show tropes are (especially when Rick expands upon his detection device and opens Curse Purge Plus, a rival business across the street that helps rid Mr. Needful's victims of their curses), the sight of Rick always being victorious would have made for a disposable and one-note A-story if Summer hadn't been part of the story. Her frustrations with Grandpa Rick add some much-needed tension. She starts to favor Mr. Needful over Rick as a grandfather figure because she finds the Devil to be kinder to her than her own grandpa. Summer doesn't even care that this new parental figure she's chosen is Beelzebub. With horrible parents like hers and a standoffish asshole like Rick, she'll take whatever she can get.
Unlike Morty, Summer won't stand for Rick's jerkiness (or misogyny, like in "Raising Gazorpazorp") and is able to call him out on his shit. "Raising Gazorpazorp" pulled off the impossible: it made me actually end up liking Summer as both a character and the other voice of reason on the show besides Morty. Someone in the A.V. Club comments section astutely noted that if Rick is the Doctor and Morty is any of the companions (particularly from pre-Ace-era Doctor Who) who were just there to get the Doctor to spit tons of exposition, then Summer is any of the modern-day companions who are gutsy enough to challenge him (in other words, Summer is basically Donna Noble, but less shrill-sounding).
Rick refuses to admit that he's bothered by Summer's complaint to him that he doesn't care about anything or anyone, but of course, he's bothered by it, as we see in a great understated scene where Rick comes home to an empty house and ends up dining alone (Beth, who's underused on the show despite Harmon's love for that character and the elaborate and mostly off-screen backstory he's written for her, is absent for almost the entire episode; Summer is busy with the store; and Morty and Jerry are busy with their own B-story). At the dinner table, Rick attempts to make conversation with the little dining room robot from the cold open, which he programmed to always pass him the butter, and not even the robot will talk to him ("I am not programmed for friendship"). It's a funny "his genius is his gift and his curse" moment, and it's especially fitting in an episode about cursed people.
But when Mr. Needful Zuckerbergs Summer from the staff of his store, which he ambitiously relaunches as an online business that he renames n33dful.com, Rick proves that unlike Mr. Needful, he does care about others. Sure, Rick may be cold and heartless most of the time, but whenever someone in his family is wronged by an outsider, like when Morty was nearly sexually assaulted by Mr. Jellybean in "Meeseeks and Destroy," he always has their back. He proposes to Summer a plan to physically strike back against Mr. Needful, and she jumps right on board. But because Rick and Morty is such a twisted show, Rick and Summer's big bonding moment involves them injecting lots of steroids into each other's asses.
(Photo source: Morty and Rick)
I'm glad the show opted for DMX's "X Gon' Give It to Ya" instead of Bonnie Tyler's overplayed "Holding Out for a Hero" for both the bodybuilding/revenge montage and the amusing post-credits tag where the roided-out duo dishes out justice on the streets and beats up a neo-Nazi skinhead, a playground bully, an anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church member (and what a great time to air an episode featuring this sight gag too, due to Westboro hate-monger Fred Phelps' death) and a man abusing his dog. Between Mazzy Star, Belly and now DMX, Rick and Morty has been killing it in the existing songs department.
The B-story in "Something Ricked" pales comedically in comparison to the A-story, but I like the pro-science and anti-corporate (but thankfully non-preachy) bent that runs through both storylines, which results in "Something Ricked" being Rick and Morty's most politically charged episode to date. Jerry volunteers to help Morty with his model of the solar system for the school's upcoming science fair, but when he learns from Morty that Pluto is no longer considered a planet, the stubborn Jerry refuses to accept the exclusion of Pluto. During routine surveillance of Earth, the ruling citizens of Pluto overhear Jerry's argument that Pluto should remain being considered a planet, and they abduct Jerry and Morty and bring them to their world to boost the Plutonians' morale.
Of course, Jerry's newfound fame on Pluto as the darling of both the so-called cognoscenti and high society goes to his head, while Morty learns from an underground radical from the scientific community that the Plutonian king is using Jerry to distract the public from the ecological damage that Plutonian corporations are wreaking on their own world, hence Pluto's diminishing size and loss of its planet status. Morty's refusal to go along with the Plutonians' denial of the truth--their cluelessness mirrors the ignorance of anti-science religious nuts and climate change deniers--and his attempt to get his dad to listen to him are good examples of how much this character has grown over the course of the first season due to his travels with Rick. The passive kid with learning disabilities that we were introduced to in the pilot has evolved into a voice of reason who has learned to work around those disabilities and become the closest thing to a hero on this show.
There's a nutso theory I've seen on Reddit: due to their similar stuttering patterns, Rick is actually Morty as an old man and has gone back in time to help his younger self overcome his disabilities. In other words, he's his own grandpa. I don't buy it--it's a twist that's already been done on many of these animated sci-fi shows, from the animated Star Trek to Futurama, and it'd be too hackneyed for Rick and Morty--but then again, like Harmon said in the Sepinwall interview, which is worth the lengthy read, anything's possible on Rick and Morty.
Other memorable quotes/stray observations:
* Jerry: "Well, I mean, traditionally, science fairs are a father-son thing." Rick: "Well, scientifically, traditions are an idiot thing."
* Robot: "What is my purpose?" Rick: "You pass butter." Robot: "Oh my God." Rick: "Yeah, welcome to the club, pal."
* Mr. Needful: "Do I need to call the police?" Rick: "Here, you can use my phone. Don't worry. It won't make you deaf because I'm not a hack."
* "Summer, you know, your grandfather's right. This store curses people. That's my business." "Well, yeah, fast food gives people diabetes, and clothing stores have sweatshops. Is there a company hiring teenagers that isn't evil?"
* Rick: "This eerily intelligent doll was threatening to murder its family. Now it does their taxes." Talking doll: "Everything's deductible!"
* "Mines like these suck plutonium up to the cities, where corporations use it to power everything, from diamond cars to golden showers."
* Summer: "We're going to file Chapter 11 and do some restructuring." Rick: "Sounds like code for 'You win, Rick!'" Summer: "That was important to you, wasn't it?" Rick: "Nope. It was important to your dumb devil friend. To me, this was all just a bit, like when Bugs Bunny fucks with the opera singer for 20 minutes."
* This has nothing to do with Rick and Morty, but Carnegie Hall's Ensemble ACJW posted this week a live medley of 43 animated series main title themes, all from kids' shows, except for Neon Genesis Evangelion, South Park, Family Guy and Futurama (my personal favorite moment: when the ensemble started performing the Dexter's Laboratory opening theme). Because of the growing popularity of Rick and Morty (it's been a ratings success on Adult Swim), composer Ryan Elder's Rick and Morty theme is bound to show up in someone else's similar animated series theme medley video some time in the future. I always thought the Rick and Morty theme had a Doctor Who-esque feel to it, and I was partly right: it turns out that Roiland told Elder he wanted the Rick and Morty theme to be a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme and the Farscape theme (Roiland's a huge Farscape fan). "It's this amazing original piece that takes the best aspects of those two themes and mashes them together," said Roiland to TVOvermind.
Nah Right posted last week a lengthy and interesting interview with jazz pianist Bob James, one of the most sampled musicians in hip-hop. What started out as a contentious relationship between James and beatmakers because of their tendency in the late '80s and early '90s to sample music without permission (James sued DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince over the unauthorized use of "Westchester Lady") has mellowed into something less hostile and gone in some unexpected directions. James started collaborating with former X-Ecutioners DJ Rob Swift and has now assembled the new release Rhodes Scholar: Jazz-Funk Classics 1974-1982, a compilation of his own most sampled instrumentals that's being marketed to newer fans who were first exposed to James through hip-hop.
James' 1975 cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," which the late Jam Master Jay flipped in Run-DMC's 1986 classic "Peter Piper," is included on Rhodes Scholar. So are "Nautilus," a 1974 tune James originally thought of as filler but has become one of his most frequently sampled compositions (it's looped in "Daytona 500," one of my favorite Ghostface Killah joints), and 1981's "Sign of the Times," which opens with a calliope solo by James that provided Prince Paul with a catchy hook for "Keepin' the Faith," a highlight of 1991's De La Soul Is Dead, my favorite De La Soul album. Of course, Rhodes Scholar would have been incomplete without the first James tune I ever heard, "Angela (Theme from Taxi)," which also has been frequently sampled by beatmakers.
Both "Angela" and "Groove for Julie," another theme James wrote for the still-hilarious sitcom about loser cabbies in Manhattan (a show that premiered 35 years ago on September 12, 1978--I didn't need Marilu Henner's highly superior autobiographical memory to verify that), are currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS. Why? Is it because I'm a smooth jazz softie? No, I'm hardly a smooth jazz softie, and who cares that it's smooth jazz? James' Taxi score music is just damn good.
When the original Law & Order was filmed on location in New York City, TV reviewers would often say the city itself was like a seventh main character on L&O. Even though Taxi also took place in the Big Apple, you see very little of the actual city during Taxi.
That's because this studio-bound show was never filmed on location and never had any scenes outdoors due to the limitations enforced by three things: 1) the multi-camera sitcom format, 2) a modest budget ($260,000 per episode, much lower than the $1.5 million it cost to shoot each episode of the low-cost-by-today's-standardsIt's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in 2010) and 3) the Taxi producers' insistence on a realistic look (which was achieved by having all the cab scenes occur at night and shooting them on a pitch-black stage with remarkably convincing, stage play-style lighting effects to simulate passing lights, rather than shooting them against a cheesy-looking blue screen). So instead of New York, James' score music is the eighth character on this seven-member ensemble sitcom, and it does the job of establishing the troubled but oddly alluring late '70s/early '80s New York setting that the city itself couldn't do (outside of stock footage) because like many sitcoms at the time, Taxi was filmed in front of a live studio audience in Hollywood.
That's how integral James' music is to Taxi, even though you hear only 10 or 15 seconds of it during the zoom lens-reliant establishing shots that co-creator/showrunner James L. Brooks carried over from his previous sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. James' groovetastic and mostly melancholy instrumentals--the sort of themes you'd encounter while watching a gritty poliziotto from Italy but not a multi-camera '70s sitcom--helped define and distinguish Taxi, its character-based humor and its distinctively bleak tone in the same way Henry Mancini's West Coast jazz sounds defined Peter Gunn, Angelo Badalamenti's ethereal and sometimes kitschy motifs defined Twin Peaks and Yoko Kanno's brassy, J-pop-meets-the-Knitting-Factory jams defined Cowboy Bebop.
The bleak tone was why both Taxi and the equally sophisticated and gritty Barney Miller stuck out like sore thumbs on the late '70s/early '80s ABC sitcom schedule, surrounded by much broader and more dumbed-down sitcoms like Happy Days, its gazillion spinoffs and Three's Company. It's also why Taxi continues to stick out like a sore thumb in reruns (good luck finding Taxi on cable, although I hear Me-TV network affiliates are rerunning it again) and continues to have a reputation as a slept-on classic, even though it influenced Taxi staff writers Glen and Les Charles' hit creation Cheers; the earlier seasons of The Simpsons, Brooks' biggest hit as a TV producer; the original Office; Party Down; and Community--and even though the animalistic asshole persona of Danny DeVito's Louie De Palma paved the way for misanthropic Larry David creations like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and even DeVito's own It's Always Sunny.
I abhor most older sitcoms with studio audience laughter or laugh tracks, a.k.a. canned laughter. But Taxi is one of the few I still revisit either on the CBS streaming service or in bootlegged form on YouTube (screw Paramount's DVDs of the show, which are disappointingly bare-bones and slightly butchered due to music rights issues) because the writing and acting on Taxi were always tops (even during that occasionally bumpy first season where the writers had trouble figuring out what to do with Randall Carver's John Burns, a proto-Woody Boyd who was written out of the show in the second season and replaced in the cast by a guest star from the previous season, the much more funny Christopher Lloyd as drug-addled Reverend Jim Ignatowski). It remains one of my favorite shows.
You read about--or if you're a masochist, you watch--a racist piece of shit like the Seth MacFarlane production Dads, and its lame-ass punchlines bum you out about many things, like the shabby state of multi-camera sitcoms today. None of these newer multi-cams--even with frequent Taxi director James Burrows at the helm of many of their pilots--measure up to Taxi. Quality writing and genuine laughs elude these multi-cams like the meaning of a yellow light during Reverend Jim's driver's license exam.
Taxi's more low-key and realistic side was represented by the characters of world-weary pragmatist Alex Rieger, ambitious single mom Elaine Nardo, aspiring actor Bobby Wheeler and thick-headed prizefighter Tony Banta and what current Dissolve writer Noel Murray referred to in a 2004 A.V. Club piece as "building small stories out of the cabbies' money troubles or their offbeat passengers while dealing more honestly and humorously with the indignity of a service economy." Some critics and even some Taxi fans felt that low-key and realistic side meshed awkwardly with the show's Simpsons-y, outlandish side. That other side consisted of Ignatowski's confused wordplay shtick and stoned hijinks; Latka Gravas and his split personality issues; the strange customs and brefnish-fueled pastimes of the unnamed Eastern European country Latka and his girlfriend/wife Simka emigrated from; and of course, tyrannical Louie and his various schemes. I never agreed that it was an awkward juxtaposition. I always thought the way Taxi juggled both sides was perfect. Speaking of perfection...
"And then there's that Bob James theme song, so pretty and forlorn, playing in the opening credits over an endless shot of a cab crossing a bridge and never getting anywhere," wrote Murray. "It's the whole mood and meaning of the show, established in less than a minute."
True. There are several interesting bits of trivia about that opening credits footage. Who's the driver inside that cab on the Queensboro Bridge (which, by the way, was renamed in 2010, in honor of former NYC mayor Ed Koch, an enemy of hip-hop culture who was famously put on blast by Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing)? He's none other than Tony Danza, and the Taxi producers culled the footage from the same shoot where they filmed the only scene shot on location in NYC in the show's history: Tony's amusingly brief "Memories of Cab 804" flashback to the moment when he stopped a passenger from jumping off the Queensboro Bridge. The problem with the footage that was chosen for the intro was that it was only 15 seconds long, which wasn't enough time to flash the credits of Taxi's sizable cast, so the editor looped the footage. It resulted in a clever and dark-humored encapsulation of the show's premise of working-class dreamers struggling to succeed. It also made the bridge as long as that airport runway in the climax of Furious 6.
The choice of "Angela" was another happy accident, and like the bridge footage, the tune wasn't originally intended for the opening credits. It was a theme James wrote for a character named Angela Matusa (Suzanne Kent), an obese and lonely phone operator Alex befriends in "Blind Date," one of the show's earliest episodes.
I've recapped Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Batman: The Animated Series producer Bruce Timm's latest series, a few times for "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" during the series'first season, and though I'm not really a fan of the Green Lantern Corps space cop characters and I had a nice nap when I went to see the live-action version, I've found this Cartoon Network CG series to be surprisingly good. Aya, a heroic, Spock-like female AI who was created by Timm for the series (and is terrifically voiced by Grey DeLisle), is the breakout character on GL:TAS, as well as one of the reasons why the series is more enjoyable than the much-maligned Ryan Reynolds version (that movie was remarkable for somehow being both overstuffed and undernourished at the same time).
I don't own an iPhone because I currently can't afford one and because I don't care for smartphones. Like Greg Proops, I think smartphones are causing society to become douchier (at 39:57 of "Lobsters," Proops astutely likened iPhone addicts to the subjugated citizens in Brave New World as part of his reply to a Smartest Man in the World listener's question about aspects of 20th century dystopian novels that are pertinent to today). But if I did own an iPhone, I'd kick Siri's ass out and have her replaced with the super-reliable Aya. And at least Aya won't try to tell me jokes that are hilarious only to John Malkovich.
Even though I'm neither a machine like Aya nor a reformed alien thug like Razer, I have an easier time relating to Aya's arc of wanting to be taken seriously as a Green Lantern and Razer's shame over his past as a Red Lantern than I did trying to relate to Hal Jordan's hackneyed daddy issues during that inane movie. That's all due to Timm and his crew's knack for intriguing characters (which raises the question "Why doesn't Warner Bros. ever place the scripts of its non-Batman live-action DC films into the more capable hands of either Timm, Alan Burnett, Paul Dini or any of the other talents who have shepherded DC Animation's hit shows and made-for-video movies?"). Another reason why GL:TAS is superior to the Reynolds movie (which, by the way, was directed by Martin Campbell, who recently wiped out the stench of the live-action GL with the excellent pilot he directed for ABC's new action drama Last Resort) is the simple fact that it's animated. Animation, especially CG, is a more suitable medium for the Lanterns and their cartoony-looking powers than live-action, which was where the Lanterns looked unconvincing and inert.
GL:TAS airs on Saturday mornings, which is an unusual time period for an animated cable show's first-run episodes (because most of them tend to air first-run in the evenings), but it's the same time period where earlier Timm projects like The Adventures of Batman & Robin (a retitled, more Robin-centric version of B:TAS) and Superman: The Animated Series first aired back when network TV ran cartoons on Saturdays. Most of the cartoons I used to watch on Saturdays had terrible, colorless and frequently recycled score music, but GL:TAS doesn't. The crappy-sounding electric guitar work and T.J. Hooker drum machines that used to define Saturday morning score music in the '80s and early '90s are nowhere to be found on GL:TAS.
The show's score music, which comes from newcomer Frederik Wiedmann, is original from start to finish in every episode--"recycling" is a dirty word in the Warner Bros. Animation music department--and suitably majestic. There's lots of brass and choir, plus a motif for each major character (for instance, Razer is represented by an electric violin theme), just like how each hero and villain on B:TAS had a motif or instrument that defined him or her musically (I don't think Robin had his own theme on B:TAS though, and I don't remember if he did because I don't really care for that character). Because of Wiedmann's scores, I always feel like I'm watching an epic sci-fi movie whenever I play back an episode of GL:TAS.
Frederik Wiedmann at the Úbeda PlayFest with future composer Kyan Wiedmann (Photo source: BMI)
As work continues on GL:TAS' second season, La-La Land Records has released 36 of Wiedmann's first-season score cues on the GL:TAS soundtrack album, and I've added my favorite pieces from the album to the "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks. Wiedmann's GL:TAS music sounds even better live, as attested by the following footage of a 65-piece orchestra and a 40-piece choir performing a suite of Wiedmann's GL:TAS themes at the PlayFest animation/video game music festival in Úbeda, Spain back in July. At the end of the footage, the man who's pretending to get choked up over the emotional portion of the GL:TAS suite is GL:TAS co-executive producer Giancarlo Volpe:
I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."
That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."
In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.
The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.
In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."
The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.
The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.
Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)
Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.
