March Madness March of the Day: "Washington Ending & Raiders March" from Raiders of the Lost Ark by John Williams

My favorite Raiders of the Lost Ark score cue is actually "The Map Room: Dawn" (Indy discovers the Ark's location, and the London Symphony Orchestra is both stoked and disturbed), but the end title theme, which features a full statement of some obscure composition called "The Raiders March" and "Marion's Theme," ain't too shabby either.

"A piece like that is deceptively simple to try to find the few right notes that will make a right leitmotivic identification for a character like Indiana Jones. I remember working on that thing for days and days, changing notes, changing this, inverting that, trying to get something that seemed to me to be just right. I can't speak for my colleagues but for me things which appear to be very simple are not at all, they're only simple after the fact. The manufacture of these things which seem inevitable is a process that can be laborious and difficult."

--John Williams on "The Raiders March," from the liner notes of DCC Compact Classics' 1995 expanded reissue of the Raiders score