March Madness March of the Day: "Theme from Human Target" by Bear McCreary

"Bear McCreary's Christopher Chance theme is as important to that character as the Raiders March is to Indiana Jones, the Imperial March to Darth Vader, or Jerry Goldsmith's 'It's A Long Road' theme for the Rambo character," said a Human Target fan in an online petition where he called for Fox to bring back Jonathan E. Steinberg and the Walking Dead scorer as the showrunner/composer duo on Human Target during its second and unsurprisingly final season.

Although it bore little resemblance to the terrific and psychologically complex Vertigo master-of-disguise comic it was based on, the much more straightforward TV version of Human Target, particularly in its first and best season, was an enjoyable action drama in the vein of Burn Notice and Leverage. But it was far more globally minded than the confined-to-Miami Burn Notice (shot on location in Miami) and the confined-to-Boston Leverage (shot in Portland, Oregon, which poses as Boston and other cities, much like how Human Target's Vancouver homebase was disguised--a la the comic book version of Chance--as San Francisco and other locales). So in the music department, Steinberg, who once said his globetrotting and martial arts-heavy version of Human Target was built out of the DNA of the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones films he grew up watching, encouraged McCreary to think big and epic.

"The real thrill of scoring Human Target comes from the unprecedented creative freedom I’ve been given to create the kind of sweeping, thematic and adventurous score largely absent from both the small and large screen in recent years. And while the heart of the score is old school, its [sic] not a throwback or a parody," wrote McCreary in his blog post about working on Human Target's pilot episode. "My goal was to create a continuation of classic orchestral scores, not a regurgitation of them."

McCreary's score music, from the 33-second main title march that trumpeted Chance's heroics to the themes he wrote for each love interest or villain, sounded superb. It was reminiscent of the dashing-sounding work of the late Shirley Walker, whom McCreary idolizes, and her staff of composers on Batman: The Animated Series, and it was accomplished on an amazingly large scale, despite a limited network TV budget (snowy Vancouver as not-exactly-snowy SF... again?!). Human Target's first season featured music performed by a 60-piece orchestra or larger, like in the series highlight "Christopher Chance," both the last episode before Steinberg and McCreary's exit and the last good episode (other than a Steinberg-penned second-season ep that reunited Mark Valley's eccentric and remorseful assassin-turned-bodyguard with Lennie James' unrepentant thug Baptiste, his ally-turned-nemesis-turned-ally).

One thing I enjoyed about the first-season Human Target opening title sequence, which evoked Human Target's comic book roots and was produced by the highly esteemed Imaginary Forces title design studio of Mad Men fame and directed by Karin Fong, was how it was animated and edited to the rhythms of McCreary's classy and cinematic-sounding march.

"This perfect timing between music and images was achieved because I actually wrote the music first, months in advance, and delivered it to the animators as a guideline," wrote McCreary at the beginning of his Human Target stint. "This combination of imagery and ballsy orchestral music make [sic] a bold statement, that this series is going to be something special. Chance is not your typical action hero and his music is not your typical electronica-inspired TV scoring. The title promises that you are about to watch a movie."



The ballsy orchestral sound lasted only one season. This was due to Human Target becoming a victim of showrunner musical chairs, one of many aspects of the TV industry I'll never fully understand. Tim Jones did decent work as the original score composer for one of Human Target producer McG's other action shows, the more comedic and soapy Chuck, but when Jones replaced McCreary on Human Target, his efforts paled in comparison to McCreary's. Jones' much less epic Chuck sound was wrong for Human Target, as was the whole Chuck-ification of Valley's show that was spearheaded by Steinberg's replacement, Chuck veteran Matt Miller, in Human Target's second season (why do the words "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" come to mind?).

In Human Target's second-season opening titles, Jones' theme briefly references McCreary's Chance theme at the beginning, but it morphs into this strange and unengaging beast that doesn't match the movements of the mostly unchanged opening title graphics. It's emblematic of Jones' less epic approach, which was the opposite of what McCreary said he wanted to achieve with his music for Chance.

Jones' theme is so out-of-place in the opening titles that "Human Touch" by Rick Springfield--who starred as Chance in an earlier and much more short-lived TV incarnation of Human Target--would have been a better replacement.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Pulp, "Like a Friend"

On Monday, I began a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during the "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post will provide info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and point out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used. Sometimes, the post will be brief, and sometimes, it'll be long. Today, it's a long one.

Song: "Like a Friend" by Pulp
Released: 1998
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: This awesome track--written by Pulp and composer Patrick Doyle for the 1998 Great Expectations remake that Doyle also scored--showed up in The Venture Bros.' recent fourth-season finale "Operation P.R.O.M."
Which moment in "Operation P.R.O.M." does it appear?: It was the most effective use of an existing song on TV in 2010. I'm referring to the finale's closing montage, where the wildly funny animated series briefly hits pause on the comedy to deepen the character of badass SPHINX operative and former Venture family bodyguard Brock Samson, with the help of "Like a Friend." In less than four minutes, the sequence brings closure to both Brock's love/hate relationship with love interest and nemesis Molotov Cocktease and the season-long thread about Brock's self-imposed separation from the Ventures.

Artwork by Annie Wu (Photo source: Wu)

Alan Sepinwall, the biggest championer of NBC's cult show Chuck, once said he found The Venture Bros. to be unfunny (huh?) and unappealing. Of the two pop culture reference-heavy action comedies, which are both about losers who are trying to make sense of a crazy universe full of comic book supervillain-style adversaries who constantly want them dead, The Venture Bros. is clearly the more consistent and superior show. It's more willing to shake things up in its universe, like keeping Brock separated from the Ventures for most of the fourth season or having The Monarch's meek and flabby underling 21 gradually morph into a more capable, assertive and muscled henchman, yet still retain a bit of his previously buffoonish self when he continues to talk to his dead best friend 24 as if he's still alive. (As someone who often finds the Buy More hijinks on Chuck to be less entertaining than the spyjinks and thinks the Morgan character is better utilized in the latter because of Josh Gomez's chemistry with Adam Baldwin, I was hoping the destruction of the store at the end of last season would mean no more stories at that limited and increasingly tiresome setting. But that was not to be when the CIA rebuilt the Buy More this season.) Team Venture is also far less reliant on music montages than Chuck. Like The Wire, the animated series is aware that music montages have more of an impact when they're used sparingly.

Storytelling drawbacks aside, there's a lot to like about Chuck, but the more flawed and screwy characters in The Venture Bros. make Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's creation a more interesting show. Chuck is ultimately about triumphing over cowardice and self-doubt to win both the girl of your dreams and the respect of the U.S. government (or the respect of the Buy More). It's a nerd's fantasy that presents how nerds would like to see themselves. That's not a bad thing, but it can also make for formulaic viewing (Chuck's current season has been an uneven one where I've found my attention wandering, despite whatever Yvonne Strahovski's almost wearing that week and the presence of Timothy Dalton, who has to be the show's greatest casting coup so far). Meanwhile, The Venture Bros. isn't concerned with triumph. It's about failure, the inability to impress or satisfy women and the difficulty of overcoming inner demons like cowardice, self-denial or unhealthy sexual appetites--in other words, it shows the ugly reality of how most nerds really are.

Okay, now I see why Sepinwall doesn't like The Venture Bros.

Favorite curse word substitutes that aren't "frak"

The other morning, the surprisingly not-so-awful 1993 made-for-cable action comedy Taking the Heat surfaced on my TV in the background. It starred the very attractive Lynn Whitfield as a slit-skirted rookie NYPD detective assigned to escort wimpy murder witness and love interest Tony Goldwyn to court while mobsters attempt to bump him off on the hottest day of the summer. (It's too bad Whitfield never became the action movie star that she should have been because in Taking the Heat, she's as fierce as Pam Grier, running around sweltering New York and Toronto locations in heels--and on horseback at one point--and never once taking those heels off.)

The late New York radio DJ Frankie Crocker acts as a Greek chorus during Taking the Heat. I didn't grow up listening to Crocker on the radio, so whenever I hear his voice, I think of "Crocker!"--Prince Paul's way of half-assedly bleeping out the obscenities during the sketches(*) on one of my favorite albums, De La Soul Is Dead.

(*) In an earlier post, I said a skit is "some lame, amateurish thing kids perform at a summer camp or church." It's also a usually unfunny and thankfully short comedy bit that's the most common example of filler on a hip-hop album. The difference between the skits on most hip-hop albums and the skits on De La Soul Is Dead is that the DLSID bits are slightly longer, which makes them qualify as sketches, and genuinely funny.

I hate censorship in any form. (According to Cursebird, I swear like a Scottish comedian.) But when you can't fight the censors, sometimes you have to come up with ingenious ways to depict rough language without attracting the attention of those uptight [Crocker!]s. You can make up your own curse words a la Mork & Mindy, the 1978 Battlestar Galactica, Hill Street Blues, Red Dwarf and motherfrelling Farscape, or you can conceal the curse words in foreign languages like on Firefly and Caprica. For my money, South Park, Archer and TNT's Southland opt for the best method, which is to have the actors utter the obscenities and then bleep out all of them, except for "shit," "goddamn" and "pussy." (Before he died, George Carlin was probably relieved to see that some of the words he once famously put on a pedestal are now safe for basic cable.)

Who's the person who tweeted that nerds should stop adding the rather clunky-sounding "frak" to normal everyday conversations? Buy that person a drink. The masterminds behind the following five euphemisms also deserve a drink because they perfected the art of sneaking in expletives.

"Crocker!" (De La Soul Is Dead)
For some inexplicable reason, the tracks on De La Soul's insult humor-filled second album are uncensored, while most of the sketches are not. They feature Black Sheep member Mista Lawnge as the voice of "Hemroid," a playground bully who steals a cassette copy of DLSID from one of his victims and becomes frustrated by the album's lack of violent lyrics while listening to it ("Van Damme! What happened? What happened to the pimps? What happened to the guns? What happened to the curse words? [Crocker!] That's what rap music is all about, right?"). Prince Paul's intentionally half-assed censorship of the swear words in the sketches is part of what makes them funny. He covered up most of the cursing with a soundbite of someone saying "Crocker!"--a reference to the legendary DJ. "Crocker!" isn't the only curse word substitute during the sketches. There's also the memorable "Put the tape back in, natal wart!"

"melonfarmer" (the syndicated TV version of Repo Man)
Like me and millions of others who hate watching feature films on channels that aren't TCM, IFC or Sundance, Alex Cox considers the practice of redubbing profanity in movies to be ridiculous, so he had some fun with it by taking what could have been a completely unwatchable commercial TV butchering of his cult classic Repo Man and making it somewhat entertaining. The TV cut contained intentionally lame new dialogue like "Flip you, melonfarmer!"

"smeg" (Red Dwarf)
One of the few elements Ronald D. Moore's Galactica unfortunately retained from the inferior 1978 original was the fake swearing, which sounds like a Mormon's idea of how people curse (in fact, that's what it was--Glen A. Larson is a Mormon, so I blame them for the creation of "frak," which the '70s version spelled as "frack," and "felgercarb"). Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the creators of the sci-fi Britcom Red Dwarf, coined a slightly more inventive swear word 10 years after "frack" by replacing "shit" and "fuck" with a word they claimed they didn't know already existed. (Do not click on the link in the previous sentence if you're enjoying your lunch, smeghead.)

"Ooh la la!" (The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson)
I like how The Late Late Show's way of dealing with Ferguson's French has been to cover it up with a well-placed French flag and his cheesy imitation of a frog. Because of Ferguson's year-long goal to learn Spanish, the flag was recently changed to a Spanish one, and "Ooh la la!" is now "¡Ay caramba!"

"lint-licker" (Orbit Gum ad)
Treme staff writer and Undercover Black Man blogger David Mills is spot-on about the homewrecker lady from his current favorite commercial, whom he refers to as "a cross between Karen Carpenter and a cheap French oil painting." Her way with a euphemism makes the Galactica and Caprica cast members sound like lints.

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 1

In March, I gave up resisting Twitter and launched a page there to write any blog posts that are only two or three sentences long. I didn't like Twitter at first, but I've adjusted to it, and now I think it's a more enjoyable and appealing microblogging/social networking site than the cluttered and less stripped-down Facebook.

I've found Twitter's 140-character limit to be a great way to test out my humor writing and be better at brevity. On Facebook, members have somehow discovered ways to bypass the character limit on their status updates, which has resulted in two things: 1) a lot of users writing updates that are longer than the Iliad, which kills the point of a microblog, and 2) me glancing briefly at those long-winded updates and wanting to log out of Facebook as fast as I can.

However, Twitter has a few downsides as well. Too many Twitterers have used the site to write some of the most vapid and boring microblogs I've ever come across (which resulted in Lewis Black uttering on Attack of the Show one of my favorite quotes about vapid-sounding Twitterers, "I'm not that interested in my life! What kind of ego do you have to have to think other people are interested?... If you're walking around telling people what you're doing, then guess what, you're not really doing it, are you? You're describing it!"). Instead of tweeting nonstop about every single activity in my life, I've preferred to focus most of my tweets on either the Fistful of Soundtracks radio station, movies and shows I've watched, links I want people to check out or links to the posts I write here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.

But the biggest downside of Twitter for me is that unlike Blogger or WordPress, Twitter doesn't automatically create archives of your older tweets, making it difficult to access older tweets that either you or someone else posted. If you want to access an older tweet without repeatedly clicking on the "more" link at the bottom of the page, you have to have previously copied and pasted the tweet's URL somewhere on your computer (like on Notepad) so that you can copy and paste that URL into your browser.

Because of the lack of an archive section on my Twitter page, here's a compilation of the tweets from my page that have received replies or have been retweeted (Twitter slang for being quoted), starting with my very first tweet.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dammit. I give up. I'm on Twitter now though I'm not feelin' the concept. I'm joining only b/c writing 140-ch. posts on Blogger seems lame.
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

Awesome. My first word on Twitter was "Dammit," which, in the Cosby household, means "Russell."
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

You know who does the best dammits on TV? Kiefer. Not since DeForest Kelley has someone taken dammiting to a whole 'nother level.
1:00 PM Mar 14th from web


@pfunn I see that dumb new name and I think, "Shouldn't it be pronounced 'sy-fee,' as in the Syufy [sy-yoo-fee] movie theater chain?"
1:31 PM Mar 16th from web in reply to pfunn

Rotten Tomatoes Show on @current is the anti-Movie Mob. Their webcam reviews come from intelligent folks, not annoying attention whores.
11:15 AM Mar 20th from web

I prefer Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead) over John Hughes b/c SSH's '80s comedies aren't as racist as Hughes'--and they're weirder.
11:37 AM Mar 20th from web

Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College is on Fox Movie Channel right now. Damn, tanktop-clad Tom Kenny is paler than @jimgaffigan.
11:38 AM Mar 20th from web

Is it me or do some Twitterers sound like Norm MacDonald as Larry King reading his USA Today News & Views column? http://tinyurl.com/d2m79h
4:08 PM Mar 21st from web

How nice. An earthquake just woke me up.
10:46 AM Mar 30th from web

Dammit, I can't get that silly Lady Gaga "this beat is sick" refrain out of my head ever since I first heard it on #Chuck last week.
1:30 AM Apr 11th from web


@gcdb She's the creation of a gay mad scientist who needed a new icon to worship b/c Madonna and Dona Versace are getting too old & creepy.
8:34 AM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb


@gcdb I bet every Canadian right now wants to bitchslap Billy Bob Thornton just like how Kurt Russell slaps around BBT in that movie.
7:56 PM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb

There needs to be an Asian American comedians' version of MST3K or Cinematic Titanic or #twitflixing (like the HGers' skewering of Crank 2).
4:08 AM Apr 17th from web

Why are Asian Americans always so serious and humorless and tweedy when they write essays or posts about racist pieces of shit like Crank 2?
4:13 AM Apr 17th from web

We Asian Americans need to take a cue from MST or HG or Paul Mooney and try a comic approach to ripping to shreds the Crank 2s of the world.
4:18 AM Apr 17th from web

@ALBaroza I want to do a live show in which an AA comic & I do snarky running com. on a racist flick. A RiffTrax-ish site might be dope too.
11:28 AM Apr 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza

"Why don't you make like a bass player and be inaudible?"--Metalocalypse. I've posted my all-time favorite basslines on @LivingSocial.
9:15 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 5. Jamiroquai, "Space Cowboy (Stoned Again Mix)"--the ultimate #420 anthem. Bassist: Stuart Zender.
9:18 AM Apr 20th from web


Basslines: 4. Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson's Barney Miller theme. Bassist: Jim Hughart. Rarely does a Jew on TV get a theme this funky.
9:20 AM Apr 20th from web

Basslines: 3. Freddie Hubbard, "Red Clay." Bassist: Ron Carter. ATCQ fans know this bassline from "Sucka N," which sampled a cover of "RC."
9:24 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 2. Slave, "Just a Touch of Love." Bassist: Mark Adams. Sampled by De La Soul ("Keepin' the Faith") and Das EFX ("Shine").
9:27 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 1. The Smiths, "This Charming Man." Bassist: Andy Rourke. His bass work is the coolest part of the chune.
9:30 AM Apr 20th from web


I can never hear "Ready to Go" by Republica again without thinking of Dr. Girlfriend.
4:33 PM Apr 20th from web

To be continued.

WonderCon 2009 wrap-up

Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.

WonderCon! Fighting evil as it comes!

I'm attending this weekend's WonderCon, where the lead actors from Chuck and Sit Down, Shut Up (Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz's upcoming animated sitcom) will plug their shows and attempt to make sense of strange and awkward questions from creepy fans and microphone hogs. In San Francisco, you know it's WonderCon time when you see Stormtroopers and Sailor Moon try to cross Howard Street. The cosplayers and their cool costumes are always a highlight of any con. At WonderCon, I'll be going as an unemployed loser who's trying to jumpstart his scriptwriting career.

Above is a snapshot of a cosplayer at the 2007 WonderCon, which is the first--and last--WonderCon I attended. The Team Misaki Studios site snapped this photo of Wonder Woman doing the "up yours" gesture or blocking bullets or something. WonderCon '09 will feature the West Coast premiere of next week's DVD release of the badass Wonder Woman animated movie, which I saw at the New York Comic Con.

I'm looking forward to the Star Trek and Ed Brubaker panels and the overpriced Costco-quality pizza.