It's not a parody, it's a pastiche. And that's fine, because the TOS theme is itself a pastiche of "Beyond the Blue Horizon," with a bit of "Begin the Beguine" thrown in.
TAS music...
- Thread starter Warped9
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It's not a parody, it's a pastiche. And that's fine, because the TOS theme is itself a pastiche of "Beyond the Blue Horizon," with a bit of "Begin the Beguine" thrown in.
Using a dvd screen grab program in movie capture mode and Apple's GarageBand program I've been trying to grab audio tracks of some of the scoring. The problem is the character voices and sound f/x layered over the tracks even when I'm trying to cut-and-paste clips together eliminating the extra noise. I haven't quite given up, but I'm getting close.
Here's a tip: get the Jason of Star Command DVDs. They reuse a lot of music from TAS, and in some instances (or at least one instance -- I'm only partway through the first disc at this point), it's played over the end credits and is thus heard "in the clear," without dialogue or sound FX. It might help you come closer.
EDIT: No, actually it was only the one time. By about halfway through the first season, they had a permanent end title theme. But the music cue that is heard (partly) in the clear is one of my favorite TAS cues, the one I described in post #11 above -- except it's the second half of that cue, the part with a repeated, driving figure on low strings and a slower, rising horn figure on top of that.
It's interesting... that particular "danger" cue was used constantly in TAS and in Jason of Star Command, and in various other shows, but I think it was only used once in the entire 15 episodes of Space Academy, the direct predecessor series to JoSC. Some Filmation shows used much more library music (at least from earlier/contemporary series) than others. SA had a mostly original score with only a few episodes recycling TAS/library cues. JoSC was about equally original music and recycled TAS or SA cues. Flash Gordon seemed to rely almost entirely on original cues; at least, it had no TAS, SA, or JoSC music (except for one or two occurrences of that one-note violin-vibrato sting that was used to underscore almost every moment of surprise or sudden peril in most Filmation shows).
Also, at least one of the Filmation DVD sets (The Secrets of Isis) has the option to play an isolated music/SFX track without voices. Unfortunately, the music and SFX were mixed together and the original masters are unavailable, so there's no way to isolate the music from the FX. But it's better than nothing. I don't recall how much TAS music was in Isis (that set is still in my Netflix queue), but there might be some.
EDIT: No, actually it was only the one time. By about halfway through the first season, they had a permanent end title theme. But the music cue that is heard (partly) in the clear is one of my favorite TAS cues, the one I described in post #11 above -- except it's the second half of that cue, the part with a repeated, driving figure on low strings and a slower, rising horn figure on top of that.
It's interesting... that particular "danger" cue was used constantly in TAS and in Jason of Star Command, and in various other shows, but I think it was only used once in the entire 15 episodes of Space Academy, the direct predecessor series to JoSC. Some Filmation shows used much more library music (at least from earlier/contemporary series) than others. SA had a mostly original score with only a few episodes recycling TAS/library cues. JoSC was about equally original music and recycled TAS or SA cues. Flash Gordon seemed to rely almost entirely on original cues; at least, it had no TAS, SA, or JoSC music (except for one or two occurrences of that one-note violin-vibrato sting that was used to underscore almost every moment of surprise or sudden peril in most Filmation shows).
Also, at least one of the Filmation DVD sets (The Secrets of Isis) has the option to play an isolated music/SFX track without voices. Unfortunately, the music and SFX were mixed together and the original masters are unavailable, so there's no way to isolate the music from the FX. But it's better than nothing. I don't recall how much TAS music was in Isis (that set is still in my Netflix queue), but there might be some.
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RobertScorpio
Pariah
Ummmm...I almost agree...but I do like DS9s theme too..but yeah, I will find my self humming the TAS theme and wonder where it came from..
Rob
Scorpio
I have a soft spot in my heart and my childhood memory for the theme to TAS.
Honestly, I couldn't stand the TAS opening theme whwn I was 10 and watching the show on Saturday mornings on NBC - and I still don't care for it today. That said, there were a few pieces of TAS incidental music that did work.
When I was four living in Hawai'i, TAS was on ABC (it had been off of NBC for years). Every Saturday morning, I plopped down in front of our small color television and waited anxiously for that theme song to hit. Then the echo behind Shatner's narration. My MEGOs at my side, I was taken far into the final frontier. So, whenever I hear it, I still get all warm and fuzzy inside.
I was a teen when TAS played - in glorious black and white - during first-run Saturday morning TV here in Oz.
In late 1975, colour TV arrived - and the concept of weekday "breakfast TV" was still quite new, too. TAS, "for the first time in colour!", was used as a drawcard to watch "The Super Flying Fun Show" every morning, and my brothers and I eagerly awaited the repeat screening of "Albatross" to see what colours the animated cast really turned during the auroral plague, since they just went various shades of grey on Saturday mornings.
I love the TAS music!
I knew we'd see eye-to-eye on this, Therin!
Heh..."The Super Flying Fun Show" totally sounds like something the Japanese would come up with!
Only the name.
Copying the format of a rival network's "Good Morning!!!", it started with "Miss Marilyn" Mayo and a comedian named Rod Hull, who played a stupid TV station janitor, Caretaker Clott. He owned a pet emu (ie. a puppet head and neck, plus feathery body and long dangly legs, which Clott held under one false arm). Miss Marilyn would introduce the cartoons, avoid being bitten by Emu the emu, do live commercials, pull kids' letters from a barrel, then ring them live and spin a prize wheel. (There was a major copyright controversy when Hull moved to England, taking Emu with him and the network made a new Emu for his wacky replacement, Marty Morton. A similar style of puppet, Ozzie Ostrich, was created for a Melbourne TV show, and eventually became more famous.)
TAS episodes were serialized across a whole morning's show. Frustratingly, "The Pirates of Orion" must have had some reels labeled incorrectly and segments were usually played out of order. They eventually fixed the error after we kept writing to them.
Cool! We had Emu for breakfast every morning!
That emu kept me in stitches! Thanks for a morning smile. 
Yep, I was about to add that. It's a musical technique called "inversion", and it does just what TigerOfDarkness described.
Another famous, but not as obvious, example is Anikin's theme from "The Phantom Menace". It's a fragment of "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" done in inversion. Some London Symphony Orchestra musicians were hip to it during the initial recording sessions; one of them approached John Williams and said, slyly: "We know what you're doing."
Speaking of Filmation themes resembling Trek themes... anyone remember Space Academy? It was a 1977 Filmation live-action show which was kind of like Star Trek for kids (second-pilot scripter Samuel Peeples wrote many of its episodes), and its theme melody (by the same composers as the TAS theme) has almost the same chord progressions as Jerry Goldsmith's ST:TMP theme which was written two years later. Also, the melody in its 6th-7th bars (the end of the second "line" of the tune) is exactly the same as the 4th-7th notes of Goldsmith's theme. An interesting coincidence. (This is the show that co-starred Brian Tochi and Pamelyn Ferdin, who had both been in "And the Children Shall Lead." And its spinoff Jason of Star Command co-starred James Doohan and former Landru Lawgiver Sid Haig.)
^^Actually it isn't. It's the same composers and the same style, but as I said, the actual reuse of stock cues varies from show to show. Space Academy mostly used its own original library of cues, with only a few episodes using stock music that was also utilized in TAS, although other episodes used stock cues from different Filmation shows (such as a fanfare from Tarzan). The first season of Jason used a lot of stock cues from TAS, but I watched the first DVD of the second season just last night, and its music was mostly new for the season along with a few recycled cues from the first season; so far, in eight episodes, I've heard at most a couple of seconds of music from TAS, a tiny fragment dropped in as a bridge between two other cue fragments when they were re-edited to fit the action of the scene. And I'm not even certain it really was from TAS; it could've just been a similar-sounding moment in another cue.
Note that Jason season 2 was contemporaneous with Filmation's Flash Gordon, which as I said above reused virtually no cues from earlier shows. By 1979, it seems, Filmation cut the reuse of cues from earlier shows to a bare minimum (although its 1981 Blackstar did reuse a lot of Flash Gordon cues, as I recall).
In fact, that's one of the things that's great about seeing these DVDs -- rediscovering "Blais/Michael" (i.e. Ellis/Prescott) music cues I haven't heard in three decades, music that I had running through my head all the time while these shows were originally on, but that I'd totally forgotten I knew. I have all the TAS episodes on tape, so I've heard their music many times over the years, but hearing the original music in SA and JoSC and FG again is like rediscovering long-lost friends.
Note that Jason season 2 was contemporaneous with Filmation's Flash Gordon, which as I said above reused virtually no cues from earlier shows. By 1979, it seems, Filmation cut the reuse of cues from earlier shows to a bare minimum (although its 1981 Blackstar did reuse a lot of Flash Gordon cues, as I recall).
In fact, that's one of the things that's great about seeing these DVDs -- rediscovering "Blais/Michael" (i.e. Ellis/Prescott) music cues I haven't heard in three decades, music that I had running through my head all the time while these shows were originally on, but that I'd totally forgotten I knew. I have all the TAS episodes on tape, so I've heard their music many times over the years, but hearing the original music in SA and JoSC and FG again is like rediscovering long-lost friends.
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