"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Roxy Music, "Same Old Scene"

Song: "Same Old Scene" by Roxy Music
Released: 1980
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's mainly due to its appearance at the end of the first episode of the impressively soundtracked British cop show Ashes to Ashes, a sequel to the original version of Life on Mars that ran on BBC One from 2008 to 2010 and like the original, left a present-day British cop stranded in the past (this time, it was Keeley Hawes' Alex Drake, trapped in both 1981 and huge Dynasty shoulder pads).

From an Ashes to Ashes first-season soundtrack album customer review at the British version of Amazon.com, which notes that "Same Old Scene" isn't on the album:

But most mystifyingly, the one track which for me was as much the theme of the series as Bowie's 'Ashes To Ashes' itself - Roxy Music's 'Same Old Scene' - is also not included. This track was used in the ultra-cool sequence at the end of episode one which contained virtually no dialogue. The piece of music that the show's producers were originally going to use for this was 'Imagine' by John Lennon; considering how much the mood of the sequence would have been altered if they had gone ahead, it becomes clear how essential this Roxy Music song actually was in setting up the dark, brooding, sexually charged atmosphere so successfully evoked.

BBC America has yet to air Ashes to Ashes' third and final season, which I haven't seen yet, so unless I click to Wikipedia to read the spoilers, I have no way of knowing if Ashes to Ashes ended in a brilliant, David Bowie-scored way like the original Life on Mars did or in a batshit-crazy, completely random, "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet"-style way like the American Life on Mars did. Apparently, decades-old reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation are a bigger priority to BBC America (last time I checked, that show's not British).



All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
The Dubliners, "The Rocky Road to Dublin"
Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"
The Skyflakes, "Talk About Today"
The Jackson 5, "Never Can Say Goodbye"

Funky Cops: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 5

"Lacuna Matata" concludes--for now(*)--with another recollection of a show barely anybody remembers.

(*) If there are any other forgotten shows or pieces of pop culture you want me to add to the "Lacuna Matata" series, let me know.

This time, the subject of this "Lacuna Matata" installment isn't exactly a classic or a buried treasure worth digging for. Remember this curio from a few years ago?


Funky Cops was a bawdy, Austin Powers-style French cartoon show about a pair of disco-dancing '70s San Francisco cops with scary-looking Jay Leno chins that I caught a few times on Fox's Saturday morning schedule in 2003. It was apparently big in France, and it spawned two volumes of not-so-bad original music from the show. The Brand New Heavies-esque tunes are easily the best part of Funky Cops.

I can't say I liked Funky Cops. For the disco sequences--I think each Funky Cops episode was 80 percent disco sequences, 20 percent cop show stuff--the animators took CGI animations of the title cops' dance moves and rotoscoped them, and the cels and robotic character movements in those sequences looked rather creepy and ugly (most rotoscoped cartoons look terrible, and Funky Cops was no exception). Also, the show was very French, like how The Fifth Element is a very French sci-fi movie.


One of the reasons why I checked out Funky Cops was because I wanted to see what San Francisco looks like to French animators. The show's constant shots of cars leaping over hills indicated that the Frenchmen did their homework by watching the Bullitt car chase--and that's about it. Aside from the hills and the glimpses of Chinatown, the Transamerica Pyramid and the Golden Gate Bridge, Sucka Free looked more like the nondescript city where Penny took care of her mentally challenged Uncle Gadget than the Sucka Free I know.

Another thing that made Funky Cops an interesting curio was its bawdiness, which showed how much Saturday morning network TV standards had loosened since the days when Rev. Donald Wildmon's theory about Mighty Mouse being a cokehead forced Ralph Bakshi to trim some footage from Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. The standards changed probably because animated Saturday morning TV was slowly dying and nobody gave a shit anymore.

Funky Cops' sexualized character designs were clearly inspired by Austin Powers. The show's creators, Christophe and Benoit Di Sabatino, even ripped off the white Funky Cop's thatch of chest hair from Austin. The bawdiness was one of several elements fpsmagazine.com contributor Terrence Briggs criticized on the rec.arts.animation newsgroup:

The character designs are grotesque, featuring overly sculpted arms, huge chins, and triangular female breasts (of which you'll see plenty on this show). The Elvis lookalike has a grin that takes up most of his face. The black dude, on the other hand, has no lips and rarely shows his teeth, while his chin and Afro duke it out for ownership of his head. Their black supervisor has HUGE lips...

The musical score pays homage to far better R&B from the era. Unfortunately, the lyrics and vocal performances are embarassing, and they're always used over the silent scenes. The theme song, however, is catchy and well-produced...

And the writing doesn't save the day. Scripts often feature lame comedy (bad singing, ironic sentiments about how awesome and timeless disco is, slacking on the job) and tired plot devices (Could the episodic female dancer who has stolen Ace's heart be the episodic jewel thief?).

Funky Cops made me think I could create a funnier '70s cop show spoof than the Di Sabatino brothers' animated series, so in 2003, I tried to write a comedic screenplay called Timegroove, about a present-day Filipino American cop who gets sent back in time to 1977. I typed up a complete treatment, a full list of '70s tracks I wanted to use (like "Skin Tight" by Ohio Players and "In the City" by the Jam) and a screenplay that only went as far as 11 pages. Except for a cameo I wrote for legendary, now-retired KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond and a gag involving an argument about who sang "Back Stabbers" that escalates into a fistfight, my unfinished Timegroove screenplay isn't very good. Three years later, BBC's Life on Mars premiered and was such a clever '70s cop show homage that I decided the world didn't need another one.