The style guide for A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog

(Photo source: BACKYard Woods Explorer)

• Titles of songs, album tracks, short stories, TV series episodes, DVD or Blu-ray featurettes and cable channel or radio station programming blocks are always contained within quotation marks. Example from July 29, 2011: The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon. (However, even though Adult Swim is still technically a Cartoon Network programming block, the name isn't contained within quotes because Adult Swim evolved from a single-night block to a larger entity that Nielsen officially recognized as distinct from Cartoon Network in 2005, much like what happened to Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite.)

• Occupations or descriptive adjectives and nouns that appear before people's names are never capitalized. Example: constant self-recycler James Horner.

• Terms like "Filipino American," "Asian American" or "African American," which some writers prefer to hyphenate, are not hyphenated.

• The interpunct that used to be part of the Frito-Lay product name "Chee·tos" is absent whenever Cheetos is mentioned because of Frito-Lay's current official spelling, which removed the interpunct. Example: Why the hell does John Malkovich look like a human Cheeto during Transformers: Dark of the Moon?

• Numbers from one to nine are spelled out. Numbers above nine are written as figures (10, 11, 12, etc.) but are spelled out whenever they're the first words in sentences.

• The movie title Se7en and the procedural title Numb3rs maintain their unique spelling even though it looks stup1d.

• If a person is a Jr. or Sr., there is no comma between the name and Jr. or Sr. Example from January 13, 2009: Downey Jr. never drops character until the commentary is over.

• An ellipsis indicates a hammy pause. Example: "Dammit, Bones... this girdle you gave me for... my birthday... is too... constricting."

• Titles of movies, TV series, radio programs, podcasts, books, comic book series, magazines and newspapers are always italicized.

• Cardassians are whores for fascism. Kardashians are whores for attention.

(Photo source: Overthinking It)

• Names of online magazines like Salon and Slate are italicized. Names of blogs like DISGRASIAN, Burnt Lumpia and MovieMorlocks are not italicized.

• A Corolla is a car I damaged while driving it when I was a teen. A Carolla is a racist douchebag whose ass will get damaged by a gang of Pinoy teens if he ever sets foot in Daly City.

• Names of races and nationalities like African, Latino and Filipino are capitalized, but racial adjectives like "black," "white" and "brown" are not.

• "Sit for Baines" is a Back to the Future prequel fanfic about teenage George McFly's bumbling attempts to get to better know his crush Lorraine Baines by babysitting her younger brothers. "Shit for brains" is Fox News whenever it refers to Common as a gangsta rapper.

• Though this is an American blog and the word "license" is always spelled with just one "c," the British spelling of the 007 movie title Licence to Kill is left unchanged.

• "Michele Bachmann" is spelled with just one glassy "i."

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Parodi/Fair, "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)"

Song: "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)" by Parodi/Fair
Released: 2002 (it was recorded in 1995)
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The "Rome, Italian Style" block focuses on how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music. Former Arsenio Hall Show band keyboardist Starr Parodi and her husband Jeff Eden Fair, whose film and TV scoring work as a duo has included the mid-'90s United Artists logo music and the Lifetime cop show The Division, are hardly outsiders, but their arrangement of "The James Bond Theme" from 1962's Dr. No is my favorite cover of that theme that never appeared in a Bond film.

On this date in 1963, "The James Bond Theme" (composed by Monty Norman and arranged by John Barry) entered the American pop charts. It captured the danger and allure of Bond's universe so well that every Eon Productions Bond film since Dr. No has featured it, and every non-Eon Bond film that doesn't feature it is, musically, kind of dickless without it--like Never Say Never Again or The Rock, which I like to think of as a sequel to the Sean Connery 007 installments because Connery was clearly playing Bond again, despite being named "John Mason,"(*) a safe-enough name choice to keep the Ian Fleming estate's lawyers away.

(*) If one likes to think of the name Bond as a mantle that's assumed by many different male MI6 agents instead of Bond being the same orphaned bachelor (and later, widower) from 1962 to 2002 despite five different faces, heights and accents(**), then that was a great way to explain why MI6 replaced the anonymous Scotsman who assumed the Bond identity from 1962 to 1967 and then briefly again in 1971: the U.S. government imprisoned his arse.

(**) Maybe Bond is really a Time Lord. All those STDs he picked up must have caused him to regenerate four times.

In 1995, United Artists recruited Parodi and Fair to do an updated version of "The James Bond Theme" for the GoldenEye teaser trailer, months before filming was completed on Pierce Brosnan's first movie as 007, which was also the first movie in which Eon enlisted Martin Campbell, the New Zealand-born director of the classic British miniseries Edge of Darkness, to rescue the hit-or-miss 007 film series from one of many periods of creative (and this time, also legally related) doldrums.

"We were in a unique and exciting situation because we had been given the assignment of bringing the Bond theme into the 90's," recalled Parodi and Fair on their official site. "Fortunately we were given lots of artistic freedom because the picture of the GoldenEye Teaser was to be edited to our music arrangement. We wanted to give the theme a sense of mystery and tension that would break out with tons of energy that suits the action that Bond films deliver."

The duo succeeded. Their nifty, trip-hop-influenced take on "The James Bond Theme," which constantly changes tempos, announced so effectively to the world during the GoldenEye teaser trailer that Bond was back in action again. It recaptures the danger and allure of Bond's universe in a way that Marvin Hamlisch's fun(***) but not-as-alluring "Bond '77" cover from The Spy Who Loved Me doesn't. Maybe it's due to the trip-hop sound, which is better suited for 007 than the disco sound of "Bond '77" because trip-hop is so influenced by Barry's spy movie scores, and artists from that genre are so fond of sampling those scores too, which is what Parodi and Fair did with the original 1962 recording of "The James Bond Theme" in their teaser trailer music.

(***) It's mostly because of the cowbells.

In 2002, it was nice to finally be able to have on disc the teaser trailer music, which became a staple of MGM/UA's trailers and ads for the Brosnan films. The trailer music made its CD debut on the Best of Bond... James Bond compilation, which Capitol released to mark the film series' 40th anniversary. At that time, the series was stuck in yet another creative rut (Brosnan's films did well at the box office but were becoming increasingly slipshod, script-wise). It wasn't able to come out of this rut until Eon enlisted Campbell again to helm what ended up being the best--and least juvenile--Bond film in decades. Mr. Bond, you have a nasty habit of surviving.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Goldfrapp, "Lovely Head"

Song: "Lovely Head" by Goldfrapp
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Trouser Press came up with a good shorthand description for "Lovely Head," the first single off the duo Goldfrapp's debut album Felt Mountain: "If Lee Van Cleef had ever romanced Shirley Bassey, 'Lovely Head,' which sounds like a score in search of a Sergio Leone film, would have been their song."

Ennio Morricone's influence on Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, which they acknowledged in the Felt Mountain liner notes with their shout-outs to Morricone and Leone, is most evident in "Lovely Head." There's whistling, harpsichords, percussion reminiscent of Il Maestro's Sicilian Clan main title theme and a vocal effect that's as bizarre as the coyote howls in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly score, but it's more of a Goldfrapp touch than a Morricone touch. Goldfrapp, who provides the whistling during "Lovely Head," makes her voice sound remarkably like a theremin(*), with the help of a synthesizer that distorts her vocals (her theremin-like howls also turn up during another Felt Mountain cut and "Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day, "Pilots").

(*) In his intro for the TCM Essentials Jr. broadcast of the theremin-filled Thing from Another World a couple of days ago, host Bill Hader said, "Transformers would be so much better with a theremin." True that.

"Lovely Head" also channels the grandiose sound of the secondary themes John Barry composed for either 007's love interests or the foreign destinations where 007 would shag those love interests. The Bondian strings and drums of "Lovely Head" inspired a YouTuber to replace "All Time High," one of Barry's weakest Bond ballads, with "Lovely Head" in the Octopussy opening titles.

The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like Royal Pains, a doctor show, In Plain Sight, a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection, and Walker, a cop show with no detective work (and one that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

As for SVU, I never cared for a show that's like Law & Order for people who enjoy those lame Lifetime women-in-peril TV-movies. Also, it turned Munch, one of my favorite Homicide characters, into a boring extra. That's criminal. I'm glad Christopher Meloni jumped ship because he can now concentrate on unleashing again his much-missed comedic side (a highlight of Wet Hot American Summer and the Harold & Kumar movies).

If I ran Sleuth/Cloo, here's how the schedule would look for what I always thought a crime show channel should be.

The original Law & Order isn't on here because of TNT (another reason to dislike them besides their cancellation of Men of a Certain Age). Wiseguy isn't on here because I assume the most recent syndication package is just like the DVD and iTunes versions of the show, which removed The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" from the famous "Vinnie and Sonny stare into each other's eyes and wind up as footage for The Celluloid Closet II" sequence due to clearance issues. A butchered Wiseguy is like a piece of bitter melon that winds up in my plate of fish and rice: I don't want it. The Shield is missing because Spike has the rights to it, and as for my all-time favorite The Wire, DirecTV's Audience Network currently has dibs on it. I wouldn't want to acquire Wire reruns anyway because NBCUniversal wouldn't let them air uncensored:

MONDAY-FRIDAY
6am: Columbo
7:30am: Barney Miller
8am: Psych
9am: Monk
10am: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
11am: The Rockford Files
12pm: "Brilliant But Cancelled" (a revival of an old programming block that was the highlight of NBCUniversal's long-dead Trio channel and has lent its name to a blog at the NBCUniversal-owned Television Without Pity site, the hour would alternate between Terriers, Eyes, Black Tie Affair, Andy Barker, P.I., A Nero Wolfe Mystery, Karen Sisco, Keen Eddie, the Touching Evil remake, Vengeance Unlimited, EZ Streets, Crime Story, Andre Braugher's Thief, Thieves, Day Break, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe and Police Squad!)
1pm: Burn Notice
2pm: I Spy
3pm: The Avengers (I miss A&E's Avengers reruns that used to air at 3pm in the '90s)
4pm: It Takes a Thief
5pm: Mission: Impossible
6pm: Alias (two impeccably scored spy shows back-to-back!)
7pm: "007 at 7" (a broadcast of a 007 movie hosted by Mozzie from White Collar, who points out mistakes in the movie he wouldn't have made if he were Bond)

10pm: Veronica Mars
11pm: Burn Notice
12am: The Equalizer
1am: Law & Order: Criminal Intent (just so that there'd be that one night where the Equalizer episode featuring a Full Metal Jacket-era Vincent D'Onofrio as a crazed arsonist ends up back-to-back with Criminal Intent)
2am: Homicide: Life on the Street (now what if one night, that D'Onofrio Equalizer guest shot ended up getting followed by a D'Onofrio episode of Criminal Intent and then D'Onofrio's guest appearance on Homicide?--that would be even more awesome: D'Onofrio lights people on fire, and then he apprehends people who would light people on fire, and then he gets run over by a subway train)
3am: Spenser: For Hire (as the A.V. Club comments section once said about this show, Avery Brooks is one bad motherfucker)
4am: Harry O
5am: Mannix

SATURDAY
(The whole day is devoted to one show. Sleuth's recent all-Saturday marathons of either White Collar, Burn Notice, Psych, In Plain Sight, Covert Affairs, MacGyver or Charlie's Angels actually aren't a wack idea.)

SUNDAY
6am: Movie
8am: Movie
10am: Movie
12pm: Movie
2pm: Movie
4pm: Movie
6pm: Honey West
6:30pm: The Name of the Game

8pm: Columbo
9:30pm: McCloud
11pm: McMillan and Wife
12:30am: Peter Gunn
1:00am: Batman: The Animated Series
1:30am: Duckman
2:00am: Get Smart
2:30am: Sledge Hammer!
3:00am: Car 54, Where Are You?
3:30am: Barney Miller
4:00am: "The 4 O'Clock Movie" (I'd relegate the channel's frequent broadcasts of straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme duds to this time slot and get a stand-up or some "Commander USA"-type figure to be the on-air host, so that she or he can make it a less grueling experience to sit through duds like that Van Damme movie that ends with him and Vivica A. Fox sharing one of the strangest-looking prolonged kisses ever filmed)

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Goldfrapp, "Pilots"

Song: "Pilots" by Goldfrapp
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's like the 007 theme song Goldfrapp always should have gotten to write and record (I don't know what Eon Productions thinks of Goldfrapp, but if I were one of the Broccolis, I'd sign up Goldfrapp to do the next 007 theme). Besides its John Barry-esque sound, "Pilots" is on the playlist because... well, I'll let Alison Goldfrapp describe "Pilots" via an excerpt from an interview she did for LAUNCH in 2000:

"'Pilots' is my sci-fi image, a dream about being inside of this huge black bomber. Rubber radiators for clouds! This idea of feeling very small in the big scheme of things: 'What the f--k am I?' The idea of machinery being your friends. In a city you can hear people everywhere--upstairs, next door, downstairs. But if you're always worried about who's looking in your window, it can be a bit much. But there probably is somebody looking at you from somewhere."

Goldfrapp also captured that feeling of smallness in the big scheme of things in their elegant-looking video for the "Pilots (On a Star)" remix. Too bad I can't embed the video, which is set at a futuristic airport--if it were designed in the '60s by vintage 007 set designer Ken Adam. My favorite part of the video is the hot stewardesses on kick scooters.

Hop aboard the original version of "Pilots" over at my SwiftFM site.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Count Basie and His Orchestra, "007"

Song: "007" by Count Basie and His Orchestra
Released: 1966
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's Basie's big-band cover of the recently deceased John Barry's "007," complete with the legendary jazz pianist's trademark "plink, plink, plink" at the end (although it's actually more of a "da-dee-dee, plink, plink"). Not to be confused with the much more famous "James Bond Theme" (which was written by Monty Norman and arranged by Barry), "007" is a secondary theme for the Bond character that Barry introduced in 1963's From Russia with Love, the first film in the Bond franchise that Barry scored from start to finish, or rather, from gunbarrel to final makeout session, presumably on a raft. This North by Northwest-style, stately-sounding action motif turned up frequently during the Sean Connery era of the series--the era when the Bond installments, particularly From Russia with Love, most closely resembled North by Northwest--and rarely appeared in the series again after Connery's departure. The Basie Orchestra's rendition of "007" is taken from Basie Meets Bond, an album in which the band made its debut on United Artists Records by recording a tie-in to United Artists' biggest cash cow at the time and covering its most signature themes, including, yes, "Underneath the Mango Tree."

Hear Basie get his plink on over at my SwiftFM site.

John Barry (1933-2011)

My favorite element of the 007 movies--besides the women--is the score music. John Barry, who died earlier this morning at the age of 77, wrote 11 of those 007 scores and made them so enjoyable and listenable outside the context of those movies. It's hard to listen to Barry's rousing and cool On Her Majesty's Secret Service main title theme without going up to a mirror and kneeling and pretending to aim a gun--just like what Danny once did on Hustle when he rehearsed a heist to the tune of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme blaring from a stereo.

I'm sure Barry would have rather been remembered for more than just Bond, so I'll mention that my two favorite non-Bond pieces of score music by Barry are the entire score from 1965's The Knack... And How to Get It and the theme from the Roger Moore/Tony Curtis buddy detective show The Persuaders!



"Another of the great composers has left us," tweeted Bear McCreary, who's currently scoring NBC's The Cape. "I'm cranking up The Black Hole in your honor."

Besides The Black Hole (an example of great opening title theme, schizophrenic and uneven movie--when I was a kid, I thought the Black Hole coloring book was more fun), I'm also fond of Barry's themes from The Ipcress File, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy and Game of Death.

Barry also appeared on-screen as orchestra conductors in a couple of movies he scored. He cameoed in the 1968 Michael Caine heist flick Deadfall, which Fox Movie Channel aired last week, and The Living Daylights, his final 007 project (the above photo is from his Living Daylights cameo). Barry's musical output dried up in the late '90s (his last screen credit was the 2001 WWII codebreaking thriller Enigma), but British musicians kept alive his work by sampling some of his film themes. Mono sampled an Ipcress File cue in 1996's "Life in Mono," Fatboy Slim crafted a memorable hook out of the guitar riffs of Barry's first major film theme, the 007-esque Beat Girl theme from 1960, in 1998's ubiquitous "Rockafeller Skank," and Robbie Williams introduced the You Only Live Twice theme to a new generation in 1998's "Millennium" (seven years later, another of Barry's Bond themes got a similar introduction to a new generation when Kanye West sampled "Diamonds Are Forever" in "Diamonds from Sierra Leone").

Vanity Fair's intriguing profile of Barry from two years ago offers great insight into what made Barry tick and why everyone from his Out of Africa boss Sydney Pollack to Michael Caine thought of him as a man with the Midas touch, especially when it came to music.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Spandau Ballet, "Gold"

Song: "Gold" by Spandau Ballet
Released: 1983
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the 2000 Black Books episode "He's Leaving Home." The "He" is Manny (Bill Bailey), the bumbling assistant of misanthropic second-hand bookshop owner and boozehound Bernard Black (Dylan Moran). Tired of his verbally abusive boss/flatmate, Manny moves out and ends up breaking the lump of coal that stands in place of Bernard's heart.
Which moment in "He's Leaving Home" does it appear?: Spandau Ballet's '80s empowerment anthem accompanies the montage of Manny's rise as the star model of a sleazy photographer (Omid Djalili) with a fetish for beard hair like Manny's. (The Djalili character would go apeshit like an "Oprah's Favorite Things" audience member if he visited present-day Williamsburg.) The "Gold" montage is one of the funniest sequences in the surreal Britcom's oddly arranged three-season history. During her DVD commentary with Moran and Bailey, co-star Tamsin Greig (who's currently testing the patience of reviewers as the uptight wife/writing partner on Showtime's Episodes) does nothing but laugh all through the montage when the commentary reaches that point of the episode. The sequence is one of several moments in which Black Books turns Bailey's balding and long hair into an amusing visual gag, whether it's trimming his hair to show how ridiculous Manny would look as a prim chain bookstore employee or coiffing it to hilarious effect like in the montage, which can be seen here.

I always thought "Gold" would have been a great opening title theme for a Roger Moore-era 007 flick. Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp probably thought so too. In fact, he originally wrote "Gold" as a spoof of 007 themes. (That early incarnation of the song lives on in the Goldfinger-style imagery in the "Gold" video, which is nicely covered here by Images of Heaven, a blog about '80s MTV videos. I didn't know the gold-painted chick in the video is a young, pre-Bram Stoker's Dracula Sadie Frost.)

Tomorrow's "Rock Box" Track of the Day is a much more timely and desperate-sounding song that's also about trying to keep ya head up.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Puccio Roelens, "Caravan"

Last Monday, I started 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 provides info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and points out the movie or TV series moment where the track shows up and is utilized to great effect.

Song: "Caravan" by Puccio Roelens
Released: 1971
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in Ocean's Thirteen.
Which moment in Ocean's Thirteen does it appear?: The sequence where George Clooney and Brad Pitt sabotage David Paymer's hotel room so that Paymer can give Al Pacino's hotel a bad review (the above photo is from this sequence).

I love this little-known cover of the 1936 jazz standard that was unearthed by Ocean's Thirteen music supervisor and score composer David Holmes. It sounds like a source cue straight out of Diamonds Are Forever--another Vegas movie. Ocean's Thirteen's inclusion of "Caravan" is a callback to the use of Arthur Lyman's version of "Caravan" in Ocean's Eleven.

Hotel room vandalism never sounded so chill and slick. Hear the 1971-style "Caravan" at my SwiftFM site.

Five killer samples that most people didn't know originated from film score music

Cee-Lo recently dropped his new single "Fuck You" on the Internet, and the delightfully profane break-up anthem, which originated from a song idea that Bruno Mars and Philip Lawrence of "Nothin' on You" fame pitched to Cee-Lo, has become a viral sensation. Before "Fuck You" (which has spawned a lame radio edit called "Forget You"), the Gnarls Barkley singer and former Goodie Mob MC's most popular track was his 2006 Gnarls hit "Crazy." Even though I got sick of hearing "Crazy" all over the place back in '06, I loved how Danger Mouse, the beatmaker half of Gnarls, sampled an obscure spaghetti western score during "Crazy." Not many people knew that the catchy bass line and strings were copped from Gianfranco Reverberi's "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," a score cue from 1968's Preparati la bara!, a.k.a. Viva Django. Here are five other killer samples that many listeners--including myself in some instances--didn't know came from film score music.


1. Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind" drum break, 2009 (from Isaac Hayes' "Breakthrough" from Truck Turner, 1974) [WhoSampled comparison page]
The opening drum solo in "Breakthrough" is the Betty White of drum breaks: old and ubiquitous but reliable and entertaining every time. H.O.V.A.'s biggest hit of his career is the latest of many joints to sample "Breakthrough," an instrumental you can now check out during the daily "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

2. Sneaker Pimps' "6 Underground" harp melody, 1996 (from John Barry's "Golden Girl" from Goldfinger, 1964) [WhoSampled comparison page]
If you were in college in the late '90s, you probably made out to "6 Underground." Did you know you were actually making out to the music from the dead-naked-chick-covered-in-gold-paint scene from Goldfinger?

3. Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" wordless melody, 1996 (from Ennio Morricone's "Sospesi Nel Cielo" from Malamondo, 1964) [WhoSampled comparison page]
One of my favorite videos from the '90s is the Michel Gondry-directed video for "Sugar Water" (a.k.a. the song that soundtracked Buffy's sexy dance with Xander during her "Joan Collins 'tude" phase). My recent discovery that the duo sampled Morricone's Malamondo score made me love "Sugar Water" even more.

4. Ghostface Killah's "Alex (Stolen Script)" bass line and strings, 2006 (from Henry Mancini's Thief Who Came to Dinner theme, 1973) [WhoSampled comparison page]
MF Doom's sense of humor really comes through in his choice of the theme from the Ryan O'Neal/Jacqueline Bisset caper movie The Thief Who Came to Dinner (when's Warner Archives going to release that flick?) for Ghostface's How to Make It in America-esque tale of a Hollywood thief who comes to dinner--or to be more exact, a P.F. Chang's pitch meeting with the song's title hustler, who's pitching to him the script for Jamie Foxx's Ray biopic--and proceeds to steal Alex's copy of the Ray script. As music critic Jeff Weiss once wrote about this Ghostface chune, "Aspiring MC's should study this like the Rosetta Stone."

5. Wu-Tang Clan's "Rushing Elephants" brass riffs, 2007 (from Morricone's "Marche en La" from Espion, lève-toi, 1982) [WhoSampled comparison page]
My favorite film composer and my favorite experts on martial arts cinema "unite."

AFOS: "Kiss Kiss Ban Ban" playlist

Airing this Wednesday at 10am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Kiss Kiss Ban Ban" (WEB73) from February 27-March 5, 2006.

This ep, which focuses on rejected or unused original music from soundtracks to movies like Thunderball, Ocean's Twelve and Hell Up in Harlem, got a nice mention in the RiffTrax forums in 2008. The "Kiss Kiss Ban Ban" title has double meaning. It refers to both Shirley Bassey's bizarre pronunciation of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" in the rejected Thunderball theme "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and the banishment of these tunes from the final cut.


1. Bernard Herrmann, "Prelude (from Torn Curtain)," Alfred Hitchcock Presents...Signatures in Suspense, Hip-O
2. Los Angeles Philharmonic, "The Killing," Bernard Herrmann: The Film Scores, Sony Classical
3. The National Philharmonic Orchestra, "Main Title," Alex North's 2001, Varèse Sarabande
4. The National Philharmonic Orchestra, "Space Station Docking," Alex North's 2001, Varèse Sarabande
5. James Brown, "The Payback," Dead Presidents, Capitol
6. Shirley Bassey, "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," The Best of James Bond: 30th Anniversary Limited Edition, EMI
7. Dionne Warwick, "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," The Best of James Bond: 30th Anniversary Limited Edition, EMI
8. Johnny Cash, "Thunderball," The Man in Black: 1963-1969, Bear Family
9. Blondie, "For Your Eyes Only," The Hunter, Chrysalis
10. Jerry Goldsmith, "The Dig," Timeline: Music Inspired by the Film, Varèse Sarabande
11. Lalo Schifrin, "Music from the Unused Trailer," The Exorcist, Warner Home Video
12. John Barry, "Moviola," John Barry: Moviola, Epic Soundtrax
13. Jerry Fielding, "The Water Hole," Music for The Getaway: Jerry Fielding's Original Score, Film Score Monthly
14. Jerry Fielding, "Casing the Joint," Music for The Getaway: Jerry Fielding's Original Score, Film Score Monthly
15. David Holmes, "$165 Million + Interest (into) The Round Up," Ocean's Twelve, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
16. The Smithereens, "A Girl Like You," 11, Capitol


Other than "The Payback," my favorite part of WEB73 is hearing Shirley Bassey's "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" back-to-back with Dionne Warwick's version, as if the double shot is a battle between Bassey and Warwick like that awesome moment in Dave Chappelle's Block Party when the Roots brought Jill Scott and Erykah Badu together onstage for a "Duel of the Divas Who Sang 'You Got Me.'" (Scott wrote the chorus of the 1999 Roots track and was featured on the original recording, but MCA, the Roots' label at the time, wanted a more famous artist to be part of the Things Fall Apart album's first single, so the band replaced Scott with Badu on the released version.) The duel in Block Party ends in a draw--Scott and Badu are both terrific onstage--although I prefer Scott's original "You Got Me" because in 1999, I couldn't understand some of what Badu was singing during the chorus of the Things Fall Apart version. As for which of the two versions of "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is better, it's Bassey FTW, even though like with Badu's "You Got Me," I have no idea what Bassey's singing during the chorus ("Mr. Kiss Kiss Ban Ban's not a foal"?).

Reruns of AFOS: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm. To listen to the station during either of those time slots or better yet, right now, press the play icon on the blue widget below the "About me" mini-bio on this blog. Don't be a foal like Mr. Kiss Kiss Ban Ban. Press play!

Alternate Posterama 2: Electric Boogaloo

Inglourious Basterds by David Choe.


Basterds by photographer Estevan Oriol (the Choe and Oriol posters were part of a Basterds-inspired art show that raised money for Haiti earthquake relief at L.A.'s Upper Playground Art Gallery).


Arrested Development/Star Wars mash-up. [Via The Live Feed]


Mythbusters/007 mash-up. [Via The Live Feed]


Antichrist/Fantastic Mr. Fox mash-up by SamsMyth.


Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Alan Hynes. [Via Super Punch]


Mean Streets by Raid71.


Wild Style by The Fat Beicon.


Alphaville by arrangement.


Moon by marcos c.


One, Two, Three by marcos c.


Batman Begins by TheMadmind.

AFOS: "Dance Into the Fire" live-tweet recap

Yesterday on Twitter, I live-tweeted an afternoon re-airing of the 2008 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Dance Into the Fire." (Repeats of AFOS: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm on AFOS.)

Below is the recap of my 90-minute "Dance Into the Fire" live-tweet. (My typos during the live-tweet remain unchanged, like "Madonna referenced the Luke/Vader duel... Uh, what does that have to with 007?" and "The hiring of Daniel Craig and the grittier writing of Craig's 007 movies has really reinvigorated David Arnold's 007 score music." Oh Twittersphere, why do you infect me with absent verbs and subject-verb disagreement?)

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I'll be live-tweeting my own Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode in 30 min., for the two of you listeners out there who give a shit.
2:30 PM Oct 14th from web

Technically, #100 ("Dance Into the Fire") was the final AFOS:The Series episode, so I wanted it to involve a genre I enjoy: 007 score music.
2:31 PM Oct 14th from web

On my blog in '08, I said #100's the last AFOS ep b/c I got tired of the format. What I didn't say was it was also due to monetary reasons.
2:32 PM Oct 14th from web

I can't say I love the 007 series (only 7 of the 22 installments are actually good movies), but I love the music from those films.
2:33 PM Oct 14th from web

My AFOS live-tweet will be like Pop-Up Video. A tweet with a factoid or opinion about the Bond song will pop up while it's being streamed.
2:34 PM Oct 14th from web

An hour and a half of all 22 of Eon Productions' 007 opening title themes, right now on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel!
3:00 PM Oct 14th from web


Monty Norman's Bond theme in Dr. No is classic, but good God, the rest of his Dr. No score isn't as listenable as John Barry's scores.
3:03 PM Oct 14th from web

The version of the FRWL title theme that's on disc is missing the film version's organ solo. What a kick to that poor musician's solo organ.
3:04 PM Oct 14th from web

John Barry was da man during the late '60s, shagging Jane Birkin and if the rumors were true, Shirley Bassey.
3:07 PM Oct 14th from web

The Goldfinger opening theme is kind of an overplayed song. I'll fess up to overplaying it myself on the radio too.
3:07 PM Oct 14th from web

007 guitarist Vic Flick said Tom Jones fainted after hitting the high note at the end of the recording of the Thunderball theme.
3:10 PM Oct 14th from web

Somewhere, a Jones fan reads this and wishes she were there to revive him by putting her panties up to his nose. "Are you OK? Sniff these!"
3:11 PM Oct 14th from web

My favorite part of the You Only Live Twice theme is the electric guitar riffs. John Barry originally wanted Aretha Franklin to sing "YOLT."
3:13 PM Oct 14th from web

The On Her Majesty's Secret Service theme is one of 3 instrumental 007 opening themes b/c it's hard to find a word that rhymes w/ "service."
3:17 PM Oct 14th from web

They could have rhymed "service" with "nervous," but no one's ever nervous in a Bond song. They're always confident about their lovemaking.
3:17 PM Oct 14th from web

I like the Shirley Bassey Diamonds Are Forever theme more than Bassey's more famous Goldfinger theme because it's fonkay.
3:20 PM Oct 14th from web

"Live and Let Die" is the only 007 theme with a reggae beat, unless you count Bob Marley's rejected song about shooting Sheriff J.W. Pepper.
3:25 PM Oct 14th from web

Sheriff J.W. Pepper, who epitomizes everything that's lame about Roger Moore's Bond movies, is one sheriff no one would mind shooting.
3:26 PM Oct 14th from web

Not all the themes J. Barry touched turned to gold. His Man w/ the Golden Gun theme sucks. That's partly b/c Lulu sung it w/ a sore throat.
3:28 PM Oct 14th from web

Alice Cooper's rejected Man w/ the Golden Gun theme, which wasn't sung w/ a sore throat: http://bit.ly/2rOvAK
3:29 PM Oct 14th from web


I'll forever associate Carly Simon's Spy Who Loved Me theme with the badass parachute jump by Roger Moore's stuntman that precedes it.
3:30 PM Oct 14th from web

Safeway killed whatever smidgen of coolness Carly Simon's Spy Who Loved Me theme had left by playing it to death in an ad campaign.
3:31 PM Oct 14th from web

@JavierHernandez Thanks, man. This might sound crazy, but LALD is actually one of the few 007 score CDs I don't own yet.
3:34 PM Oct 14th from web in reply to JavierHernandez

I've never seen Moonraker, but a movie w/ laser gun battles shouldn't open w/ a ballad so tepid, even though Shirley Bassey brings it again.
3:35 PM Oct 14th from web

@JavierHernandez I didn't know that. I gotta hear that version!
3:39 PM Oct 14th from web in reply to JavierHernandez

I like Bill Conti's For Your Eyes Only gunbarrel music because of the cowbell.
3:40 PM Oct 14th from web

The For Your Eyes Only theme was the first 007 song that had a music video on the then-new MTV. Roger Moore, side-by-side with Billy Squier!
3:41 PM Oct 14th from web

I'll admit to being one of the millions of viewers who wondered if Sheena Easton was naked during the the For Your Eyes Only video.
3:41 PM Oct 14th from web

Yeesh, the Octopussy theme "All-Time High" is so yacht-rocky I keep expecting Michael McDonald to sing backup.
3:45 PM Oct 14th from web

Duran Duran's A View to a Kill theme is my favorite 007 theme with lyrics even though some of the lyrics are nonsensical ("A sacred why"?).
3:49 PM Oct 14th from web

@JavierHernandez Thanks. That was sweet. Thom Yorke would be a great choice as a future Bond opening title theme singer.
3:50 PM Oct 14th from web in reply to JavierHernandez

Like Safeway did with "Nobody Does It Better," Chris Kattan killed whatever smidgen of coolness a-ha's "Take on Me" had left, so...
3:52 PM Oct 14th from web

... the only a-ha songs I like are "The Sun Always Shines on TV" and the Living Daylights theme, John Barry's final 007 theme.
3:52 PM Oct 14th from web

The 007 music went through a bit of an identity crisis during the years between John Barry's departure and the addition of David Arnold.
3:56 PM Oct 14th from web

Gladys Knight's awesome and there's a nice Goldfinger reference, but the License to Kill theme sounds more like The Bodyguard than Bond.
3:57 PM Oct 14th from web

The GoldenEye theme was sung by Tina Turner, written by Bono and the Edge, produced by Nellee Hooper, and catered by Taylor's Fish & Chips.
4:05 PM Oct 14th from web

When Sheryl Crow tries to hit high notes in "Tomorrow Never Dies," I keep thinking of the Citizen Kane opera singer wife singing in pain.
4:09 PM Oct 14th from web

k.d. lang's "Surrender," restored to the Tomorrow Never Dies opening credits by a YouTuber: http://bit.ly/k7yjn
4:10 PM Oct 14th from web

"Surrender," the World Is Not Enough theme and the Casino Royale theme were all produced by David Arnold, which is why they don't suck.
4:13 PM Oct 14th from web

Woops, I spelled it "License" instead of "Licence." Colour me ignorant.
4:16 PM Oct 14th from web

In her "Die Another Day" video, Madonna referenced the Luke/Vader duel from The Empire Strikes Back. Uh, what does that have to with 007?
4:17 PM Oct 14th from web

A lot of 007 fans hate on Madonna's "Die Another Day." It's not a shitty song. It just doesn't sound very 007-like.
4:17 PM Oct 14th from web

Aw, Chris Cornell and David Arnold's Casino Royale theme "You Know My Name." Now that's more like it.
4:22 PM Oct 14th from web


The hiring of Daniel Craig and the grittier writing of Craig's 007 movies has really reinvigorated David Arnold's 007 score music.
4:23 PM Oct 14th from web

@pfunn GoldenEye is actually the only PB 007 flick that I think has held up well. His other three movies are so schizophrenic in tone.
4:24 PM Oct 14th from web in reply to pfunn

A lot of 007 fans also hate on "Another Way to Die," but at least it sounds more like a spy movie theme than say, "All-Time High."
4:26 PM Oct 14th from web

I like Jack White's shout-out to the On Her Majesty's theme during a brief guitar riff in "Another Way to Die." End of AFOS ep live-tweet!
4:29 PM Oct 14th from web

A shot of Adrenaline: The books I picked up at Comic-Con, part 1

I finally finished reading all the books I bought during my one-day trip to Comic-Con. In an August 6 post, I discussed the first book I grabbed there that day, The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, Javier Grillo-Marxuach's adaptation of the unproduced final episode of his prematurely cancelled TV series version of The Middleman.

I also picked up a TPB of Tyler Chin-Tanner's self-published miniseries Adrenaline, Debbie Huey's Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain, IDW's Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 and an exclusive Comic-Con edition of Darwyn Cooke's eagerly anticipated IDW adaptation of The Hunter, the first Parker novel by Richard Stark, a.k.a. the late Donald E. Westlake. My tastes in comics aren't usually this wide-ranging--I stick to a steady diet of mature crime or espionage titles--but this list of books I grabbed in San Diego was an exception.

I first met Tyler at the Asian American ComiCon, where we had Artists Alley tables, and I ran into him again at the SDCC, where the AACC was still on our minds (the much smaller AACC was a far more enjoyable experience than SDCC, despite the occasional moments of insensitive Artists Alley behavior). Tyler is currently at work on American Terrorist, a comic about ordinary citizens who go on the lam after they're branded as terrorists for criticizing the government (the first issue is available to iPhone and Google Android users).

Like American Terrorist, Adrenaline is ripped from the headlines, and it centers on Dr. Saida Nri, a young Nigerian physician who gets roped into competing for a $4 million grand prize on a sensationalistic, globetrotting reality show of the same title--think a sleazier version of The Amazing Race. This enjoyable actioner, which Tyler wrote and drew layouts for (with epic-looking artwork provided by penciller/colorist James Boyle and inker/letterer Fabio Redivo), is a gentle sendup of reality TV and its frequent co-opting of the extreme sports craze. Alex Lowder, the Adrenaline show's wealthy host/creator (and he's not only the host, but he's also a contestant), is a mash-up of the douchey, culturally clueless Jeff Probst and an extreme sports nut.


In some moments, the comic reminded me of director Daniel Minahan's 2001 reality TV spoof Series 7: The Contenders. The most biting part of Series 7's critique of reality TV was its comparison of the genre to snuff films, whereas Adrenaline's sharpest jabs are directed towards the rigged nature of reality shows and their showrunners' callous treatment of foreign cultures, which is depicted through Alex's poaching of a lion on a Tanzanian wildlife preserve in the series' first few pages. The illegal hunt enrages Saida, who runs a small health clinic near the preserve. In a slightly ridiculous but literally gripping action sequence, Saida displays the agility of a parkour athlete--the doctors on NBC's ER were never this agile--when she leaps onto Alex's copter to stop him from escaping from the local authorities. She gets knocked unconscious during a scuffle in the copter with one of Alex's tough bodyguards and winds up kidnapped in a moment that strains credibility (in real life, Alex would be locked up for abducting Saida, despite his power and wealth), but I let it slide because Adrenaline is essentially an over-the-top Bond film, except Bond is a compassionate Nigerian female doctor-turned-reality show contestant who's trying to save her struggling clinic (and her Maasai patients) instead of the world.


Adrenaline is loaded with thrilling sequences straight out of Bond films, from a wordless, beautifully illustrated scuba diving sequence to a downhill race between snowboarders and skiers that goes awry. In fact, as I read the TPB, I kept choosing John Barry 007 score cues that would have served as perfect musical accompaniment for those Bond-like moments (Thunderball's "Bond with SPECTRE Frogmen" for the underwater sequences, A View to a Kill's "Snow Job" for the snow race).


One of the many reasons why I despise the reality genre is because too many of those shows regurgitate the same old racial stereotypes--especially the programs on VH1, home of Flavor "No sellout" Flav--but in fairness to the genre, it has also influenced scripted network shows like Lost and Heroes to opt for racially diverse casts. Because Adrenaline is about a reality show, it contains an equally diverse cast of characters, from Saida ("What we don't see are the many strong native Africans who are leading the way in resuscitating their country. I felt they needed to be the hero of a comic book," said Tyler in a 2007 interview about Adrenaline) to Ben Wong, a brash Asian American stuntman who has a tryst with a female teammate in a romantic subplot that's a nice little up-yours to Hollywood and its emasculation of Asian guys.

Debbie Huey's Bumperboy has plenty in common with Adrenaline's Saida. They're both unlikely action heroes who are unafraid to stand up to corporate greed when it endangers the well-being of their neighbors, whether they're humans, animals--or talking mountains. In Debbie's inventive AdHouse Books graphic novel, 2006's Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain, the rubber-suited Bubtopian and his canine sidekick Bumperpup travel through a magical portal called a "borp hole" to a faraway land where they encounter a lonely and chatty mountain named Jumbra.


The duo also befriends a band of armless, marshmallow-shaped creatures known as the Grums, who speak only in Bumperpup's language of Pictonese (in which the speaker communicates by projecting pictures, much like X-Factor character Artie Maddicks) and help keep the childlike Jumbra alive by planting Grum fruit trees on his back. Without giving away too much of this second installment in the Bumperboy series, an unknown menace is causing Grums to disappear from their home, and it's up to Bumperboy and B-pup to rescue the missing Grums, save Jumbra's life and restore order to the disrupted ecosystem.


All-ages comics are not my forte, but I picked up Debbie's book because Bumperboy's ability to "borp" to distant lands is an appealing hook (it's reminiscent of one of my favorite Warner Bros. animated shorts, Robert McKimson's 1955 cartoon "The Hole Idea," about a professor who invents the portable hole, a gadget that was later featured in Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and I wanted to support a fellow Slug, especially someone who I recently discovered was involved with the same campus newspaper where I used to be a staff writer.


As with any of the best all-ages comics, kids will be entertained by Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain because of its resourceful heroes and offbeat supporting characters, while older readers will enjoy it for its wonderful black-and-white art and subtle social commentary. The book decries child labor practices and environmental racism without turning into a preachy G.I. Joe "Knowing is half the battle" PSA. Speaking of which...

The next post will focus on the rest of my Comic-Con purchases: Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 and The Hunter.