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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.

At WonderCon, I ran into an ex-co-worker, an on-and-off Fistful of Soundtracks listener (more on him in the graf after the next one) and Film Score Monthly soundtrack label founder/honcho Lukas Kendall, whom I never met face-to-face before. Lukas used to record a few phoners with me in the earlier years of the college radio version of A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Also, I got to meet some bloggers whose blogs I regularly read, I talked shop with IDW letterer Chris Mowry, I took some career advice from Keith Knight and Stephen Notley (he raised a good point about why Topher Grace would have been a better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire, whom Stephen finds to be too humorless to play a wisecracking New Yorker like Spidey), and Chris, Keith, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Darick Robertson, Erik Larsen, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Michael Aushenker signed comics or promo materials for me.


The AFOS listener I met was graphic designer Joe Sikoryak, who's responsible for the look of Film Score Monthly and its spiffy CD packaging and booklets. FSM's Superman: The Music box set (above) is one of Joe's coolest achievements. I went to see Joe at a panel he was moderating (it was for Super Capers, an indie superhero flick in which Adam West pokes fun at his Batman persona) because before the panel started, I needed him to answer a question that had been nagging me ever since I ran into him on the previous day: Was Joe the cartoonist behind The Daily Show's brilliant "Decider" segments, which reimagined Bush as a caped superhero? (Joe told me his brother R. Sikoryak was the one who produced "The Decider.") It was surreal to be talking to Joe for several minutes while both Adam West--a.k.a. '60s Batman, a.k.a. Lookwell(*), a.k.a. the Gray Ghost--and Sam Lloyd, one of my favorite supporting players on Scrubs, are sitting a few inches from you.

(*) Lookwell, a great unsold 1991 sitcom pilot written by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, features my all-time favorite West performance. West's title character is a pretentious, washed-up star of a '70s detective show who attempts to become an actual P.I.


Here I am at WonderCon's G4 booth with Attack of the Show's Blair Butler, who reviews comics and graphic novels during AOTS' Fresh Ink segment. She's guested in the past on Joe Gonzalez and Jimmy Aquino's Comic News Insider podcast (where I recently plugged Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology), so I told her both my first and last names to see what her reaction would be. Blair was initially confused because I look nothing like the CNI co-host. I explained to her that I'm Jimmy Aquino the scriptwriter and there are now two Jimmy Aquinos in the comics world.

Blair lit up when I asked her to autograph her own rave review of All-Star Superman in an issue of Geek Monthly magazine. I'm not really a fan of the Superman character or the superhero genre, but like Blair, I've enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's clever Supes revamp, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and was the recent focus of an A.V. Club "Gateways to Geekery" post. As Blair wrote in her review, All-Star Supes is "a master class on how to mesh great plotting and great pencils."

Then I said to Blair, "The Eskimo kiss you did with Olivia [Munn] made my week."



Blair said that when Olivia goes off-script or takes shtick like the Eskimo kiss or an impromptu shaving of part of Kevin Pereira's hair into unexpected directions, you can't stop her from whatever she's doing and you have no choice but to roll with it. The Eskimo kiss went way longer than Blair expected, which of course, resulted in great live TV.

Also, Blair and I wondered what is the deal with Olivia's irrational fear of balloon popping noises ("Maybe they sound like gunshots to some people").


Nice. Miramax had a booth for Adventureland, an upcoming comedy about amusement park workers from Superbad director Greg Mottola.

I wasn't at the Adventureland booth when Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr, who has a role in the film, showed up to sign Adventureland posters and tees. I would have liked to have seen how Starr interacts with fans of his old show. The former Bill Haverchuck needs to do more TV or movies. He was terrific on Freaks and Geeks.


Next time, instead of the Star Wars droids, I'd like to see the Daleks roam around the Moscone hallways, so that I'd have some fun watching the giant salt-shakers with toilet plungers harass any of the British WonderCon visitors who used to hide behind the couch during a Daleks episode of Doctor Who. (I mean, c'mon, England. Giant salt-shakers made you shit your trousers when you were kids? Really?)


Here's an Asian American Catwoman. I always get a kick out of seeing Asian American cosplayers suit up as non-Asian DC or Marvel characters.

Unfortunately, the rest of the photos I took--like a snapshot of a female Robin (the Boy Wonder, not the Witch Hunter) cosplayer--are even blurrier than the ones I've posted. There are a bunch of pretty dope Flickr photo galleries that feature WonderCon snapshots that are better than the ones I snapped.

Here's a word of advice to anyone who attends WonderCon and is actually reading this: Skip the expensive, underwhelming convention food (you're going to have to in this recession) and eat outside. Take your money to Jollibee or any one of the local cheap eateries (or better yet, non-fast food joints). Chickenjoy trumps overpriced Costco-quality pizza any day of the week.

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.