"Grandpa, tell us the story again about the man whose life got flipped, turned upside down": 10 amusing tweets related to TV theme music

--recent New York Times Magazine profile subject and Office star/writer Mindy Kaling

--Patton Oswalt and A.V. Club writer Noel Murray on TCM's TV ratings graphics music

--Patton Oswalt and John Fugelsang on CSI and The Who

--God_Damn_Batman

--fake lyrics for the instrumental theme from The Good Life, a.k.a. Good Neighbors, the subject of one of The Young Ones' funniest Vyvyan scenes:

--Jonah Hill, looking into the future

--New York Daily News writer Josh Greenman on the July 31, 2011 debt debate

--HitFix's SNL and Fringe recapper Ryan McGee

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.



2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

"Yalili Ya Aini" perfectly establishes the nocturnal and international feel of The Smartest Man, which is recorded in front of a live audience, either at The Smartest Man's homebase, West Hollywood's Bar Lubitsch, or whatever venue Proops is performing at that night, whether it's in his old home turf of San Francisco or Melbourne. Unlike most comedy podcasts, The Smartest Man doesn't follow an interview format.

"I knew I didn't want to do that [interview format] because other people were doing it and doing better. Marc [Maron] and Jimmy [Pardo] and everybody just murdering it," said Proops to Laughspin.

What listeners are getting in each Proopcast is essentially an extra 60-to-70-minute stand-up set by Proops. But instead of joke-after-joke-after-joke, Proops delivers not-always-jokey but always interesting ruminations on current events, music, film history, baseball history (he's particularly fond of the San Francisco Giants and the achievements of the Negro Leagues, so he's joked that no Proopcast is complete without him mentioning Satchel Paige) and politics (he's progressive, so President Obama, who has been to progressives what the Green Lantern movie is to nerds, irks him as much as the Tea Party does).

The Smartest Man is where I got my first exposure to British punk poet John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown," which Proops once recited to thunderous applause. I've become a new fan of "Evidently Chickentown"--and I don't even like spoken word (here's how much I understand the appeal of spoken word: whenever there's a slam poet on TV, I'm like, "Okay, when's the DJ gonna show up and drop the beat?").

Basically, The Smartest Man is like Craig Ferguson's freewheeling monologue but much more political and not as Scottish. And a little trancey, thanks to "Yalili Ya Aini."



3. "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8 (Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence)
Elvis Mitchell had the suavest opening titles of any interview show. On a loungy-looking NEP Studios set decorated with dangling lightbulbs, Mitchell walked out dressed to the nines, to the tune of the swanky 2000 downtempo track "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8, a.k.a. Swiss DJ/producer Robert Jan Meyer. This wasn't Conan in a suit gawkily riding his bicycle through Manhattan in the opening credits, that's for damn sure.

Under the Influence, in which the host of KCRW's The Treatment would chat with actors and directors about movies and movie stars they admire, was produced for only one season on TCM in 2008, but TCM still airs it from time to time. The Bill Murray episode is worth DVRing (the Laurence Fishburne ep is pretty good too). Mitchell was able to get Murray, who's notoriously guarded (except when he's on Letterman), to open up during his show and give candid discussions about movie acting and comediennes he either enjoyed watching ("Elaine May is like the most attractive woman in the world... If I had come up when Elaine May was coming up, I would have chained her to a typewriter and made love to her like every four hours just to keep her going. She's the funniest.") or couldn't understand the appeal of ("[Lucille Ball] never really made me laugh for some reason. I don't know why. Lucy was never my girl.").

"Elysian Fields" was a great choice to open and close a TCM interview show because of Minus 8's samples of dialogue from old movies (in the original version of "Elysian Fields," the samples are from the first Bogart/Bacall scene in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, but the 2007 version that was used during Under the Influence replaced the Big Sleep audio with dialogue from some old movie I've never seen and is most likely not as awesome as The Big Sleep). I wonder how the Under the Influence intro would have looked with "Yakety Sax" instead of "Elysian Fields." Alex, I think I'll go with "What is not-as-suave?"



4. "Reckoner" by Radiohead (Vanguard)
Any investigative journalism series that would open with Radiohead is tops in my book. For those who weren't aware of Current TV before Keith Olbermann joined the channel, it was best known for the compelling and sometimes difficult-to-watch documentary series Vanguard. Correspondents like Laura Ling, Mariana van Zeller and Adam Yamaguchi often put their lives at risk for the sake of the story. One such story, human trafficking in North Korea, brought international attention to Vanguard in 2009 when the North Korean government arrested Ling and her footage editor Euna Lee for trespassing while they were doing research for their piece. Ling and Lee were sentenced to a labor camp for 12 years--until Bill and Hillary Clinton intervened and ex-President Clinton successfully negotiated with Kim Jong Il for their release.

Though Vanguard no longer uses Radiohead's enigmatic and contemplative 2008 track "Reckoner," it's still an incredible program. The recent Vanguard installment "Sex, Lies & Cigarettes" is an intriguing examination of the tobacco industry's insidious marketing tactics in Third World countries like the Smoking Baby's home turf of Indonesia, although there's an angle that Vanguard overlooked: the connection between the tobacco industry's tactics and environmental racism.



Gnarls Barkley's equally terrific live cover of "Reckoner":



5. "Pheromone" by Prince (Video LP)
I remember coming home from school and turning on The Avengers on A&E and flipping over to BET's music video/interview program Video LP whenever Steed and Peel were interrupted by a commercial break. I went back and forth between enjoying young Diana Rigg's catsuited body and judo chops and enjoying Video LP host Madelyne Woods' legs, as well as the way she maintained her resolve in the face of inarticulate rappers and new jack musicians whom I realized I never wanted to hear speak in interviews.

I know some rappers fare well in an interview setting, but most of them don't, and as someone who digs their music, it's torturous to watch or hear. If you want to hear their opinions, just listen to their lyrics. Don't drag them to do a lengthy interview. They're lost without a breakbeat or a beatbox (or a bong). It's like when HBO tries to interview boxers after their fights. What do they expect them to say after 12 rounds? "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain"? What's more likely to come out of their mouths is "Myeyzcudopngrb."

Back to Woods and Video LP. Woods left BET a long time ago but is still a reporter (and is actually on Twitter), and Video LP is largely forgotten, aside from a few YouTube clips and A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Phife Dawg--one of those MCs who thrives in an interview setting--name-checked Woods ("Hon, you got the goods, like Madelyne Woods").

Video LP also bears the distinction of being the only TV show that contained theme music by Prince (he contributed to Video LP an instrumental version of "Pheromone," a song that later surfaced on his 1994 album Come). I bet Prince frowns upon scripted TV (even though he once made a guest appearance on Muppets Tonight), but I wish he'd contribute another TV theme because he's such a musical genius. It would probably sound like this (FF to 3:29):

WHAT IF... Dick Tracy co-starred Bernadette Peters instead of Madonna?

Steve Palopoli once said Return of the Jedi directed by David Lynch--who rejected George Lucas' offer to direct the threequel--was one of his picks for Best Cult Movies That Don't Exist. I told Steve I would have loved to have seen Ragtime directed by the filmmaker who almost directed it, Robert Altman, Sergio Leone's Leningrad, Resident Evil directed by George Romero, The Phantom directed by Joe Dante and Blazing Saddles starring Richard Pryor instead of his replacement Cleavon Little (although Little was great as Black Bart).

Other movies from alternate universes I would have dug are Out of Sight co-starring Carla Gugino (the small-screen Karen Sisco) instead of Jennifer Lopez and Dick Tracy co-starring Bernadette Peters instead of Madonna.


After rewatching Warren Beatty's suddenly ubiquitous Dick Tracy (it aired during TCM's Dick Tracy movie marathon yesterday afternoon and again on Syfy this morning because when I think sci-fi, I think Dick Tracy), I checked out film historian Glenn Erickson's DVD Savant review of the 1990 adaptation of Chester Gould's comic strip. I agreed with Erickson's comment on Madonna's performance as femme fatale Breathless Mahoney: "you can't help but picture Bernadette Peters in the role, singing better and being sexier too."

Peters, a frequent Stephen Sondheim interpreter, would have been perfect as Breathless, who sings several original Sondheim-penned tunes during Dick Tracy. But Peters wasn't banging Beatty at the time, so we were stuck with Madonna.


A better actress than Madonna (whose best performance was in her big-studio follow-up to Dick Tracy, A League of Their Own), Peters would have been more at ease than Madonna with the humorous side of the mostly humorless Breathless role. Plus, even though Peters is older, she's far more attractive (she's so hot in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie). I'm entertained by Peters' vocal skills--and how her dress barely stays on--during this taste of what Dick Tracy would have been like with Peters as Breathless. It's her performance of Dick Tracy's "Sooner or Later" from a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

"In this movie, this song was sung by a blond bombshell... not me," Peters says in my favorite part of her intro to "Sooner or Later." "Although we both have religious names."




If you can find Disney Comics' Star Trek: Countdown-style two-part prequel to Beatty's Dick Tracy, it's worth checking out. I remember buying as a kid the Dick Tracy: Big City Blues and Dick Tracy vs. the Underworld graphic novels, which were my first exposure to the art of then-rising star Kyle Baker. What I would give to see Baker's original cut of the prequel, before the famously narcissistic Beatty insisted on forcing Baker to redo the comics so that Dick's likeness would look more like Beatty than the Chester Gould version.

AFOS: "Living in Paradise" playlist

Airing tomorrow at 10am and 3pm Pacific on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Living in Paradise" (WEB19) from July 21-27, 2003. WEB19 was a salute to one of my favorite cable channels, TCM, the greatest non-porno, non-sports channel ever. The cleverly programmed, commercial-free channel celebrated its 15th anniversary in April and launched the Classic Film Union, a film geeks' social networking site, earlier this month.

I borrowed the "Living in Paradise" title from an Elvis Costello track. I briefly went through a phase where I was naming AFOS episodes after Costello and Clash songs.

The first half of this playlist consists of themes from movies I first saw on TCM, from classics like The Great Escape and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known flicks like Richard Lester's The Knack... And How to Get It, which is now on Hulu. The Knack opens with my favorite John Barry movie theme that wasn't written for a 007 film.


1. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title," The Great Escape, Rykodisc
2. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title and Calvera," The Magnificent Seven, Rykodisc
3. Miklos Rosza, "The Asphalt Jungle (Main Title)" (from The Asphalt Jungle), Crime Jazz: Music in the Second Degree, Rhino
4. John Barry, "The Knack (Main Theme)," The Knack... And How to Get It, Rykodisc
5. Henry Mancini and His Orchestra, "It Had Better Be Tonight (Instrumental)," The Pink Panther, BMG France
6. John Morris, "Springtime for Hitler," Music and Dialogue from Mel Brooks' The Producers, Razor & Tie
7. John Barry featuring the Voices of the Accademia Monteverdiana, "Chinon/Eleanor's Arrival," The Lion in Winter, Legacy/Columbia
8. Mark Knopfler, "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)," Local Hero, Warner Bros.
9. Duke Ellington Orchestra, "Main Title and Anatomy of a Murder," Anatomy of a Murder, Columbia/Legacy
10. Ray Charles, "In the Heat of the Night" (from In the Heat of the Night), In the Heat of the Night/They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, Rykodisc
11. Miklos Rozsa, "Overture," King of Kings, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
12. Herbie Hancock, "Bring Down the Birds" (from Blow-Up), Blue Break Beats, Volume 4, Blue Note
13. The M-G-M Studio Orchestra, "Main Title (alternate version)," Singin' in the Rain: The Deluxe Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
14. Robert Preston, "The Shady Dame from Seville (Rehearsal)," Victor/Victoria, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
15. Miklos Rozsa, "Finale (extended choral track)," Ben-Hur, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music

Repeats of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm.

Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009) and Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)

As I found out about Montalban's death, TCM happened to be airing the MGM: When the Lion Roars documentary, which features the former MGM contract player and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan star as an interviewee. The lengthy doc traces the rise and fall of "the Tiffany studio," and Montalban, in his smooth Latin playa voice, laments how "the lion stopped roaring."

Montalban was one of the few remaining survivors of the era of the studio system--a system that both helped and hurt his career. In an interesting 2002 Palm Beach Post article that unfortunately is no longer online, Montalban, who at the time was promoting TCM's Hispanic Heritage Month tribute to Hispanics in cinema, recalled his days as one of Hollywood's few Latino movie stars:

Montalban, a star in his native Mexico -- his parents were Castilian Spanish, but his physician father moved the family to Mexico before he was born -- had his troubles in Hollywood. When he was signed by MGM in 1946, there was a movement afoot to change his name to -- wait for it -- Ricky Martin.

"They couldn't pronounce my name," he says today. "Joe Pasternak, the producer, would introduce me to people as Richard Mandelbaum. Eight times out of 10, I was Richard Mandelbaum, but a couple of times I was Richard Mountbatten, and at least once he said Richard Musclebound. He had a hell of a time with it.

"So they thought my name was impossible, and they were going to change it, but then they consulted with the man who was in charge of the Latin America market, and he said, 'He has a following here, you can't change his name.' And that's the only reason I managed to retain my dignity."

The studios' strengths were in stereotyping -- the blond bombshell, the ultra-masculine leading man, etc. -- so the Hispanics they had under contract were no exception.

"I approached directors, producers, executives and tried to convince them to create other characters besides the Mexican bandit and the hot senorita. Call it ignorance, but they would tell me, 'We're trying to put as many colorful characters in the movies as we can.' They called these stereotypes 'colorful.' "

Not only that, but Montalban was aware of an even subtler prejudice. Montalban played Cubans, played Argentinians, played Brazilians, but it took years before he could play a Mexican.

"Mexico didn't sound quite right, even though we have the best muralists in the world, some of the best painters, the best heart specialists. Where were they on the screen, people of dignity, wealth and culture? Or even the very honorable middle-class man who struggles to give his kids a better education. 'An architect is not colorful,' they would tell me."

MGM didn't stint on Montalban; he worked opposite the studio's top leading ladies, from Lana Turner to Jane Powell, and was given several films in the early '50s as a stand-alone lead, though he points out that they were B films.

Even when Montalban resented the roles he was assigned, his options were limited. "When I would say, I don't want to do it, it's vapid, they would say, 'All right, you don't have to do it. But we'll put you on suspension for six months.' So that vapid role became a great role. I had a wife and four children; I never went on suspension because I couldn't afford it."

There was no cohesion within the Hispanic community in Hollywood -- everybody worked at different studios, and went home to their different houses. That would eventually lead Montalban to found Nosotros, an organization to promote Hispanic talent so that, as he puts it, "we could be judged on our ability or lack of ability, not by our names."

Because of the lack of substantial big-screen roles for Latinos and the decline of the studio system, Montalban made the jump to TV. But the small screen wasn't much of an improvement for Latinos (and everyone else who was a minority), because Montalban guest-starred as a '90s dictator from India (Khan Noonien Singh on Star Trek), a Frenchman (Combat!) and a Japanese gangster (Hawaii Five-0) and then ruled the '70s and '80s Saturday night airwaves as a mysterious island resort owner of indeterminate race (Fantasy Island).

Whether the role was inane (the taped-eyelidded act on Five-0) or not (Khaaaaaaaaaan!), Montalban the serial guest star--and serial Fakasian--brought to each of his live-action or animated performances a certain regal movie-star charisma that boosted the show. That same charisma helped add an edge to Wrath of Khan that was missing from the first Trek feature film. Returning to a character he played 15 years earlier, Montalban was pitch-perfect as the genetically engineered title villain, or as Robin Harris would have called him, "Test-tube baby!"

Montalban also played equally pivotal roles in the Planet of the Apes and Spy Kids franchises. Speaking of spies...

Another great actor has died: Patrick McGoohan, star and co-creator of both Danger Man, a.k.a. Secret Agent, and its unofficial sequel The Prisoner, which he memorably parodied on The Simpsons in one of his last bits of acting.


The Danger Man creators used the Bond novels as a springboard to conceive a spy hero who was different from Ian Fleming's "blunt instrument." John Drake wasn't much of a skirtchaser and was less violent and glamorous than 007. McGoohan actually turned down the film version of Dr. No because the actor, a devout Catholic, wasn't comfortable with playing a womanizer. But he had no objections to playing the cerebral Drake, the antithesis of Bond.

Like Montalban, McGoohan excelled in villainous roles, from Silver Streak to Columbo. He played four different killers on both the NBC and ABC versions of the Peter Falk TV-movie franchise and won Emmys for two of those characters. By Dawn's Early Light is my favorite Columbo installment because McGoohan is so mesmerizing as an unflappable military school commandant.

Wired's Underwire blog has posted a detailed remembrance of McGoohan, who wanted individuality in everything he did. "It's not easy to find it always," he said as he channeled Number Six from The Prisoner. "I question everything. I don't accept anything on face value."

Here's the classic Prisoner opening title sequence, scored by Ron Grainer, who also composed the Doctor Who theme, and featuring guitar work by Vic Flick, who performed the guitar riffs during the Dr. No version of "The James Bond Theme":