March Madness March of the Day: "Main Title" from Spartacus by Alex North

Spartacus--the film version with Kirk Douglas in the arena, not the Starz show with a frequently topless Xena--isn't a perfect epic, but I prefer it over the 2000 Best Picture Oscar winner Gladiator. Plus, the more dully scripted and much less politically intriguing of the two Roman epics didn't put an end to the Hollywood blacklist, and it doesn't open with killer Saul Bass opening titles accompanied by a riveting and slightly discordant march by Alex North. The main title theme and much of the rest of North's Spartacus score seemed to be, as Jonathan Z. Kaplan theorized in the 2000 "101 Great Film Scores on CD" issue of Film Score Monthly magazine, an attempt to go against the grain of Miklós Rózsa-style epic scores (not that there's anything wrong with the stately Rózsa school of scoring from the '50s, but it wouldn't have belonged in a downbeat and cerebral epic like Spartacus).

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

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

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

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

Film Score Monthly's latest soundtrack release

Well done, FSM.

Robert Culp (1930-2010)

Learning about the I Spy and Greatest American Hero star's death yesterday was a bit of a shock because Culp was a terrific (and Emmy-nominated) action show lead and such an underrated comic actor, even though he was also responsible for this:


That's why watching most older TV shows can be such a pain in the ass for me. I have to put up with lame bits of yellowface and brownface in everything from Bewitched to I Spy, where Culp, who was once married to half-Vietnamese actress and frequent I Spy guest star France Nuyen, played both his regular role of Kelly Robinson and a Chinese warlord in an episode he scripted (Culp also wrote frequently for TV, a little-known fact pointed out by Film Score Monthly label head Lukas Kendall in his excellent liner notes for FSM's I Spy CD).


Yellowface aside, the understated I Spy was groundbreaking TV: it envisioned itself as more like a feature film than a TV show (the title sequence even began with the rather cocky "Sheldon Leonard Presents"--Nick the Bartender wants to conquer the spy fiction business!); instead of recycled library music, it featured completely original score music every week (courtesy of the late Earle Hagen, whose I Spy theme is one of my favorite TV themes of all time); it favored location shooting in foreign countries(*) over studio backlots; it took a chance on a stand-up with no acting experience named Bill Cosby and made him the first black lead in a prime-time drama; and it gave birth to the buddy action comedy, years before Butch and Sundance. Even The Greatest American Hero--Culp's other classic buddy comedy series and the show where I and countless others from my generation first saw Culp the snarky, over-the-hill action hero--is a descendant of I Spy.


(*) I doubt any of the five major networks would allow the Culp/Cosby show--which once had to pay the Yakuza a ransom for a show crew member they kidnapped while the crew was shooting in Japan--to be filmed all over the world today like it was in the '60s, because of inflated network TV budgets and certain other obstacles. Instead, 24 tries to pass off L.A. as Washington D.C. and New York (rather miserably), and Alias (which was slightly more convincing) dressed up the Disney backlot to look like Madrid or Casablanca, among other cities. I assume the latest episode of Lost, which flashed back to Richard Alpert's original home on the Canary Islands, never even left Hawaii.

Culp had great taste in sci-fi and horror scripts. His guest shots on the original Outer Limits were among the highlights of that series ("The Architects of Fear," "Demon with a Glass Hand"), and his hard-to-find-but-YouTube-able 1973 TV-movie A Cold Night's Death--one of those thrillers where the twist ending isn't as shocking as the film thinks it is, but the journey to that ending is still entertaining--would make for a great double bill with John Carpenter's The Thing (it features an unsettling synthesizer score by Gil Melle of The Andromeda Strain fame). On a similar note, who can forget Culp's creepy performance when Bill Maxwell got possessed by an evil ghost chick in "The Beast in the Black," the Greatest American Hero ep I remember most fondly?

Five favorite expanded or limited-edition score albums of 2009

Manigong Bagong Taon. This is the only year-end list I will do because I hate doing these year-end things. Selections from all five of the following CDs can be heard during "Assorted Fistful" on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.


5. Big Trouble in Little China (La-La Land)
The cheesy end title song, in which director/composer John Carpenter does his own singing, hasn't aged as well as the rest of Carpenter's score or the movie itself, which remains subversive for giving its Asian American characters a chance to shine as the heroes of the piece for once in a genre that still doesn't care for Asian American protagonists (and no, Jackie Chan doesn't count as an Asian American lead, shitbird).

4. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (La-La Land)
La-La Land followed up the long-overdue Batman: The Animated Series box set with an expanded version of the score from the show's 1993 feature-length spinoff. Before Christopher Nolan came along, the Bruce Timm incarnation of Batman was the definitive screen take on the Dark Knight. Batman: The Animated Series was also beautifully scored by the late Shirley Walker, who provided music for Phantasm that's both powerful and playful (the choir is actually singing backwards pronunciations of the names of Phantasm crew members and orchestrators).

3. The Split (Film Score Monthly)
I was on a Donald E. Westlake kick during the summer because of the release of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter and the debut--in any format--of an unknown and very sampleworthy Quincy Jones score to a forgotten 1968 Jim Brown flick based on The Seventh. Say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby.

2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Film Score Monthly)
One cool thing about FSM's reissue of the Khan score is that it gives listeners the option of hearing the film's end title music without Leonard Nimoy's voiceover, an element of the 1982 Atlantic release that annoyed those who prefer not to hear dialogue during score albums. Also, it's nice to finally have the complete score. Somewhere, Ricardo Montalban's smiling.(*)

(*) I hate that Flanders-esque catchphrase from Fantasy Island. It's mostly because a former co-worker I couldn't stand liked to say "Smiles, everyone, smiles" a lot.


1. Bullitt (Film Score Monthly)
FSM also stands for Fulla Surprises, Man. Sometimes, I won't visit the FSM site for weeks, and I'll miss announcements like the debut release of Lalo Schifrin's Bullitt score as it was heard in the film (Schifrin's 1968 and 2000 re-recordings of his score, one of which is included on the CD, are both decent, but I always preferred the way the score originally sounded in the film). I didn't know about FSM's Bullitt CD until a couple of weeks ago and immediately snapped it up. The Bullitt score is my second favorite Schifrin film score after Enter the Dragon. The main theme has been covered so often that it's a shame the original rendition hasn't been available on CD until now.

Five definitive Star Trek cues

I was hoping a May 21 post about my unpublished 2007 wish list for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel or reboot or preboot or whatever would be my last Trek-related post for a while. No dice.

A Film Score Monthly blogger recently posted a list of five Trek score cues that best sum up or represent the venerable franchise. It's a nice list--it's cool to see Gerald Fried get some love, and though I still think the nearly wordless Star Trek: The Motion Picture travel pod sequence (in which Admiral Kirk looks like he wants to take his own starship behind a Spacedock and get her pregnant) is overlong, it's hard to dispute the post's argument that the pod sequence contains one of Jerry Goldsmith's most sublime moments as a film composer. The list inspired me to post my five favorite cues from the franchise and stream a block of these five tunes on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel all through August.

1. Charles Napier, "Heading Out to Eden," Star Trek ("The Way to Eden")
This "Way to Eden" number is one of Trek's proudest musical moments.

2. Charles Napier, "Hey Out There!," Star Trek ("The Way to Eden")
This other "Way to Eden" highlight is such a poignant expression of Gene Roddenberry's philosophy of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations).

3. Charles Napier, "The Good Land," Star Trek ("The Way to Eden")
Aw, Trek, you can do no wrong.

4. Kirk Thatcher, "I Hate You," Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
This touching melody was written and performed by a Trek IV visual effects PA who was promoted to associate producer and even got to appear onscreen as a mohawked miscreant Earthling during the playing of his own composition.



5. Bruce Hyde, "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen," Star Trek ("The Naked Time")
Not a dry eye in the house.

Alright, I'm kidding.

Not exactly a shining moment in the career of legendary female Trek scriptwriter D.C. Fontana (who hid behind an even more male-sounding pseudonym for the heavily rewritten "Way to Eden"), Trek's atrocious space hippies episode is proof that network TV series writers in their 30s or 40s aren't the best people to turn to when you need someone to capture the pulse of the counterculture.

"I Hate You" is such an ersatz punk tune Avril Lavigne mistook it for the real thing.

It's funny that Thatcher complained about the inaccurate sound of the music that was previously selected for the Trek IV bus scene because lyrics-wise, the song he contributed ended up sounding only slightly more authentic. A real punk band would never say "Screw you!" like Thatcher's "Edge of Etiquette" did during "I Hate You."

Seriously, here are my actual five definitive Trek cues.

1. Gerald Fried, "The Ritual/Ancient Battle/2nd Kroykah," Star Trek ("Amok Time")
Fried would bristle whenever the show would recycle cues like what I think is his crowning achievement, the piece that launched a million Trek music parodies ("Sometimes, I thought it was ludicrous what they did [to keep the series' music budget down], and sometimes, I think, 'Well yeah, alright, it sort of works.'"), but after the show's post-network success, I bet he's been touched by how much recognition and spoofage his catchy fight theme receives.

2. Sol Kaplan, "Kirk Does It Again," Star Trek ("The Doomsday Machine")
Oh, so that's where John Williams got his Jaws theme from.

3. Jerry Goldsmith, "Spock Walk," Star Trek: The Motion Picture
The cue that best captures the cerebral and mysterious feel of The Motion Picture isn't the rousing but somewhat out-of-place main title theme. It's the eerie "Spock Walk," which accompanies the movie's only genuinely thrilling sequence (besides the still-dazzling opening shot of the Klingon armada and the upgraded Enterprise's launch sequence): Spock's thruster-suited trip into the v'gina of V'Ger. As a Trek installment, ST:TMP is uninvolving, witless and flat (the original cast comes off as nervous and stiff in their first feature film together), but it's a triumph of mood and atmosphere, especially during the spacewalk sequence and the sterling Goldsmith cue that accompanies it.

4. James Horner, "Battle in the Mutara Nebula," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
My favorite Trek II cue, which kicks off when Kirk bites into his apple and tells Saavik, "I don't like to lose," accompanies the perfectly paced sequence in which the Enterprise and the Reliant circle each other like a matador and a bull with nacelles instead of horns.

5. Michael Giacchino's Star Trek main title theme (not found on the score album--the brief cue is most likely just snippets of "Enterprising Young Men" edited together)
The moment this enjoyably pompous new theme played over the opening title image of the gleaming Starfleet arrowhead insignia, I knew Trek was back--even though the theme wasn't Alexander Courage's classic fanfare. Like the rest of Giacchino's new material during the score, Kirk's theme, in its various forms, perfectly embodies the spirit of classic Trek.

Some viewers are disappointed that Courage's fanfare doesn't appear until the film's climax. Have they forgotten this is a prequel? To borrow Giacchino's own words, this film is about everything that came before the Trek we know. Delaying the classic Trek theme (a la the late appearance of "The James Bond Theme" in David Arnold's Casino Royale score to enhance the moment when the upstart hero finally comes into his own) was a bold and fitting move.

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.

Five favorite expanded score albums or box sets of 2008

5. Superman: The Music (Film Score Monthly)
This staggering eight-disc set compiles the scores from all four Christopher Reeve Superman movies and contains a beautifully designed mini-book filled with exhaustive liner notes. The expanded discs of the Ken Thorne scores from Supermans II and III were probably the main reason why Superman completists dove into savings that they otherwise reserve for their mortgage payments for their Luthor-owned condos in order to pay for this pricey set ($120!). I never liked Thorne's scores (the orchestra budget in II and III was clearly slashed, so Thorne's rearrangements of John Williams' music sounded tinny and undernourished). For me, the real previously unreleased gem of the set was the disc containing Ron Jones' energetic and underrated music from Ruby-Spears' decent '80s Superman animated series. Jones' Superman cues sound like the cues he later wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Best of Both Worlds" two-parter, which TNG showrunner Rick Berman reportedly disliked because he preferred the music on his show to sound boring.


4. They Live: 20th Anniversary Edition (AHI)
Obey. Consume. This expanded release of the bluesy score from John Carpenter's sharpest and cleverest post-Thing flick is your God.


3. Blazing Saddles (La-La Land)
The only previous times any of the music from Blazing Saddles was made available were when Elektra/Asylum included three songs from Saddles on the 1978 High Anxiety soundtrack LP and when "I'm Tired" made its CD debut on Rhino's 1998 Warner Bros.: 75 Years of Film Music box set. The release of the cues from John Morris' short but fantastic score to the Mel Brooks classic--another one of my favorite movies--was long overdue. All the major cues are on there, including the Count Basie Orchestra's performance of "April in Paris," which is to black cowboy music what Jay-Z's "Roc Boys (and the Winner Is)..." is to black superhero music.


2. Shaft Anthology: His Big Score and More! (Film Score Monthly)
FSM's Shaft set marked a couple of milestones: the first-ever release of the film versions of Isaac Hayes and J.J. Johnson's score cues from the first Shaft installment (the 1971 Enterprise/Stax soundtrack album was a re-recording) and the CD debut of Gordon Parks' Shaft's Big Score soundtrack. Though the release was actually sent to the pressing plant for manufacturing three weeks before Hayes' death, it ended up being the illest way to honor his memory.


1. Batman: The Animated Series (La-La Land)
Unlike previous superhero cartoon shows, B:TAS didn't recycle the same four or five score cues or repurpose creaky old library music. Shirley Walker, one of the few female composers in the business, and her B:TAS team composed an original score for every episode. Their use of a full orchestra made other animated action shows look like that pathetic El Mariachi musician character who prefers a synthesizer over bandmates. Sadly, Walker didn't live to see the release of her lovingly crafted music from B:TAS (before her death in 2006, only her score from the Mask of the Phantasm spinoff movie was released). She would have been thrilled about La-La Land's two-disc set, which is dedicated to her and compiles scores from 10 B:TAS eps, including Harley Quinn's debut ep, "Joker's Favor" (pictured above). I've been a fan of B:TAS since its 1992 premiere, so I've waited 16 years for a release like this. I never said thank you, La-La Land. And then La-La Land will probably say the following in that Batrasp that sounds like a cross between a whitened-up Keak da Sneak and a Muppet: "And you'll never have to."

The five greatest fake names from TV

These overly fake-sounding names for imaginary personas always end up being used either by bands (there's a British metal band that's actually called Cletus Van Damme) or message board posters (on the Film Score Monthly boards, I post under a fake name from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). They're all easier to pronounce than Blagojevich, a name that must be giving late night talk show hosts anxiety attacks.

1. Fuzzy Dunlop
Herc's fake CI on The Wire. Sometimes The Wire is funnier than most sitcoms.

2. Shecky Shabazz
A stage name the Fresh Prince creates at the last minute for his wack stand-up act.

3. Rafael De La Ghetto
A legendary street poet made up by the Fresh Prince to impress the shawties, with some help from Geoffrey the butler: "Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volley'd and thunder'd!"

4. Cletus Van Damme
One of The Shield's few running gags: an alias only Shane would come up with.

5. Santos L. Halper
The credit card account name Bart Simpson winds up with after he applies for a card as Santa's Little Helper.

Neal Hefti (1922-2008)

The composer of the themes from the '60s Batman TV series and the 1968 movie version of The Odd Couple, Neal Hefti died of a heart attack over the weekend. He was 85.

Here's what Jeff Bond wrote about Hefti's surf rock-style Batman theme in his liner notes for the Film Score Monthly release of Nelson Riddle's 1966 Batman feature film soundtrack:

Hefti (like Riddle a band leader and jazz arranger) wrote an appropriately dynamic and instantly recognizable theme that launched with a heavy 4/4 rhythm for bass guitar, low brass and percussion and eight singers (four sopranos and four tenors) singing the words "Batman!" in unison with the trumpets... Ironically, despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent simplicity, Hefti has described the Batman theme as one of the most challenging things he has ever written.

In 1989, Hefti received the ultimate shout-out when Prince quoted the former Sinatra bandleader's Batman theme during "Batdance," a highlight of the Purple One's much-maligned Batman-inspired concept album.

Hefti's other credits included the cult favorite Lord Love a Duck, Sex and the Single Girl, How to Murder Your Wife, Duel at Diablo, Barefoot in the Park and A New Leaf. It's a shame that much of Hefti's work--like the enjoyable Odd Couple soundtrack, which contains themes that were later reupped on the classic Tony Randall/Jack Klugman TV series--hasn't been reissued on CD (props to Film Score Monthly for including Hefti's How to Murder Your Wife and Duel at Diablo score tracks on its now-sold-out MGM Soundtrack Treasury box set).

The Nov. 4 edition of "AFOS A-Go-Go" will open with a tribute segment consisting of Hefti's themes from Batman and the '68 Odd Couple. Those Odd Couple tracks still sound sweet even though the soundtrack album is a re-recording that's interspersed with Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau dialogue clips that for some stupid reason, were reedited to include a laugh track (canned laughter on a film score album is like Mohinder's voiceover narration on Heroes--totally pointless).

Shaft Anthology CD: "What is it with this black shit?"

It warms my brown heart to see Film Score Monthly's so concerned about us minority folks.

A week that began on a sad note with soul legend Isaac Hayes' death has climaxed with some awesome news about Hayes' most beloved contribution to film music. The folks at FSM have announced that in September, they will release the Shaft Anthology box set, which will mark two milestones: the first-ever release of the film versions of the Hayes/J.J. Johnson cues from the first Shaft installment's instrumental score (the 1971 Enterprise/Stax soundtrack album was a re-recording) and the first CD appearance of Gordon Parks' score from Shaft's Big Score, with additional tracks that were not part of the Shaft's Big Score LP.

As a fan of the music from the first Shaft movie and its two sequels, this limited-edition release excites me even more than FSM's mammoth, instantly out-of-print Superman: The Music box set from earlier this year. The three-CD anthology is also a cool way to honor Hayes' memory. According to FSM, the box set was actually long in the works and "was sent to the pressing plant for manufacturing three weeks prior to his death."

All that's missing from the box set is the soundtrack from the 1973 threequel Shaft in Africa, which was reissued by Hip-O Select a few years ago. FSM will substitute the Shaft in Africa tracks with score cues from the watered-down and wack Shaft TV series, which was best remembered for removing the "sex machine to all the chicks" side of Shaft's character, much like what producer Scott Rudin forced the filmmakers to do to the Samuel L. Jackson version of Shaft 27 years later.

As soon as I receive the Shaft box set, selections from the set will definitely be added to daily playlist rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.

If you have both a PC and a Netflix account like I do, the entire 1971 Shaft flick can be streamed for free here. If you wanna see Shaft instantly, ask your mama!