The Secret Soundtracks of Movies & TV

Speaker 1 You're listening

Speaker 1 to 20,000 hertz.

Speaker 1 The stories behind the world's most iconic and fascinating sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor.

Speaker 1 Testing one, two. Testing one, two.

Speaker 1 Recently, our supervising producer Casey scheduled a mysterious recording with me and our producer Grace.

Speaker 2 I have no idea what's about to happen and I'm thrilled about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it should be fun. Basically, Casey manages this podcast, while Grace oversees our sound designers and works with our clients over at De Facto Sound.
All right, should we do this thing? Sure.

Speaker 1 I'm ready to rock. No idea what we're doing, but let's do this.
Me either. I'm so excited.

Speaker 1 Okay, so thank you for joining me on this mysterious audio journey. So this is a topic that all of us in the podcasting and TV and film industry know something about because we use it all the time.

Speaker 1 But I think there is a lot of rich and interesting history to this topic, and there are a lot of hidden connections between stuff that was made 50 or 60 years ago and modern stuff that we still enjoy today.

Speaker 1 So do you want to take a guess at what the topic is? Okay, so there's something that we would all know in podcasting and TV. Hmm.
My mind went to like radio, maybe?

Speaker 2 Like some podcast ancestor or something?

Speaker 1 Not quite. Speakers.

Speaker 1 Sadly, no.

Speaker 1 I'm just looking at things in my room. Sure, yeah, sure.
Lamp.

Speaker 1 I'll play you a little montage, and that may give you a hint. Okay.

Speaker 1 What do you think? TV show theme songs? Closer, close.

Speaker 1 70s TV show theme songs.

Speaker 1 1979 to 1984 TV show theme songs. So it's broader than that, but that definitely does apply to what we're going to talk about, which is

Speaker 1 drum roll.

Speaker 1 Vintage production music. AKA vintage library music.
You know, I was going to say, I was like, 80s theme songs that are from music libraries. Yeah, well, that would have pretty much been it.

Speaker 1 You would have said it. And you said,

Speaker 1 So, production music, also called library music or stock music, is music made to be licensed out for film soundtracks, TV, and radio advertisements, theme songs, corporate videos, you name it.

Speaker 1 Now, obviously, we use plenty of library music on this podcast, and a lot of the ads and promos that DeFactive Sound mixes use library music as well.

Speaker 1 But the quote-unquote golden era of production music was from the 60s into the 80s. During that time, there was an explosion of media demand.

Speaker 1 TV networks and film studios needed cheap but professional music. So they turned to these companies.
Wait, hold on. These companies needed cheap but professional something.
Music.

Speaker 1 So very similar to the entire industry today. Yeah, totally.
Cheap, yet incredibly professional. Yeah.
Insert anything. Can you make it amazing but also cheap?

Speaker 2 What about the specific era elicited all of this need for licensable music?

Speaker 1 I think it was just

Speaker 1 an explosion of pop media in general, television itself. There were more and more networks being born, more and more shows being born.
The movie industry was just making so much money.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it just fueled this whole industry.

Speaker 1 Most of it was coming out of Europe, interestingly enough. In those years, some of the best composers in Europe were pumping out thousands of these tracks.

Speaker 1 They were working for companies like KPM and DeWolf Music in the UK, Selected Sound in Germany, Sermy Records in Italy, Telemusic in France. There were dozens of these companies.

Speaker 1 And these libraries would give their composers briefs of what they wanted. The brief might say something like, We need music for a fugitive on the run from the police.

Speaker 1 And so they would write something like this.

Speaker 1 Another example could be music for a happy couple swimming in the ocean.

Speaker 1 Wow!

Speaker 1 Or maybe music for a spaceship traveling across the galaxy.

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 1 So composers would write one or two tracks every day, and then they would go into the studio and record with these world-class session musicians that they had on staff.

Speaker 1 The musicians themselves would be recording around eight tracks per day, so they're just getting this sheet music, knocking it out, hardly any rehearsing, I imagine.

Speaker 1 And the composers would only get paid if their tracks got used. So they were encouraged to write stuff that was versatile and appealed to what was popular at the time.
I can also set the stage here.

Speaker 1 I'm seeing thick-rimmed glasses, sideburns, mustache,

Speaker 1 smoky studios for sure. Yes.

Speaker 1 Brown everywhere.

Speaker 2 Yeah, lots of like mustard, yellow, like muted reds.

Speaker 1 Were turtlenecks a thing back then? Because I feel like 70 turtles. There were definitely 70s turtlenecks.
We should get that on the artwork. A guy who looks just like that.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it could be funky, bombastic, romantic, psychedelic, basically any subgenre of music that existed at the time. There was a production music music version of it.

Speaker 1 But it's important to note that this music was not available to the public. You couldn't just go to a record store and buy these records.

Speaker 1 Instead, the library would produce just a few hundred copies of these LPs, and they would send those out to filmmakers and production studios.

Speaker 1 The editors at those places would listen to them and decide which tracks they wanted, and then they'd pay a fee, and the library would send them the master tapes for those tracks.

Speaker 1 So it was a very manual, snail-mail process. But through that process, a lot of this stuff did end up in film soundtracks in the 1970s.

Speaker 1 So, oftentimes, filmmakers couldn't afford to commission an original score, so they'd use these cheaper library tracks, or maybe they'd hire a composer to just write a few key themes for their film, and then the rest of the music in the film would be fleshed out with production music.

Speaker 1 So, that could be for a horror movie like the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead. Here's a track from that.

Speaker 1 That is so good. That's production library.
Wow. Yeah, right? It's really good stuff, as I hope to demonstrate.

Speaker 1 There is production music

Speaker 1 in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here's a track from that.

Speaker 1 That's a library poem? Yep. No way.
That's like a Stravinsky vibe. Wow.
And then a lot of Kung Fu movies used a lot of production library music.

Speaker 1 So here's from a Shaw Brothers film called Flag of Iron.

Speaker 1 Oh, this is cool. I mean, this is just amazing.

Speaker 1 Also, the movie rating system, meaning PG, R, etc., was established in 1968. And that opened the door to more mature cinema, which was another big market for production music.

Speaker 1 So that's how you get a lot of stuff like this track, which is called Making It.

Speaker 1 Okay, that has become such a motif, though.

Speaker 2 Like, I feel like that has become shorthand in movies for like that exact theme. It's amazing.
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 Wallace.

Speaker 1 You know, my friend Jordan Brady was the comedian in the 90s. Now he's a commercial director, who coined the phrase, bow chicka wow, wow.
What?

Speaker 1 Wait, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 The fact that we have not done an episode on this is absurd.

Speaker 2 We must.

Speaker 1 That's incredible. All right, so it was in all those movies, but then it was also used on TV.
So definitely also in sports broadcasts.

Speaker 1 So here's a track called Heavy Action by British composer Johnny Pearson. Tell me if you recognize what TV program this was used on.

Speaker 1 Burner, burner, Monday Night Football.

Speaker 1 You got it, Dallas. Monday night football.
Yep. All right.
How many points is that, Grace?

Speaker 1 Tell us the score.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 I famously don't like sports, and even I knew that one.

Speaker 1 Nice. Staying with television, here is a track called The Big One by British library composer Alan Two.
Do you recognize this song?

Speaker 1 Oh, keep it, keep it going.

Speaker 1 Oh, I know this.

Speaker 1 We can't stop. We've got to get this.

Speaker 2 It's like a detective investigation, something like that.

Speaker 1 Oh, I got it. I know what it is.
What is it? The People's Court. You got it.
Ding, ding, ding.

Speaker 1 Look at that. I'm crushing on this non-game show.

Speaker 1 Yes, indeed, the People's Court theme song was also a library poll.

Speaker 2 That's wild.

Speaker 1 Another common use for library music was industrial videos, educational videos, and PSAs. So, this is a 1970s promo video from the Masonite Corporation, which made wood products.

Speaker 4 When your product is better than wood to start with, improving it isn't easy.

Speaker 4 We keep trying.

Speaker 1 So, sometimes these were not full two to three minute songs. They could also be short little musical stings and fills.

Speaker 1 One composer who wrote a bunch of those was Dick Walter, who we had on the show for our Shock horror A episode, this guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he wrote a ton of those little stings in a multi-part series called The Editor's Companion. Here are a couple more examples from that.
This is a kind of a drifting into a dream type track.

Speaker 1 Kind of like a Wizard of Oz going from Canada. Totally, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 I was just thinking that.

Speaker 1 And then here is a Hawaiian track of his called Aloha that I think you may recognize. Tell me if it's familiar.

Speaker 1 I mean, it does seem like Mai Tai on the beach type of thing.

Speaker 1 Totally.

Speaker 1 But there was a specific TV show set in an aquatic setting that used that specific track quite a bit paywatch more kid friendly i'm gonna say gilligans island but i'm probably wrong even more kid friendly and it's a modern show or a more modern show oh my god spongebob yeah spongebob squareface yes spongebob squareface totally used that one a bunch and i think maybe a few other dick walter hawaiian tracks So today it's pretty hit or miss how widely available this stuff is.

Speaker 1 Some of it is very easily accessible. Like if you type in KPM, which was one of those library companies, if you type in KPM on Spotify, you'll get a ton of results.

Speaker 1 But a lot of it is pretty rare and obscure. So there is a big subculture of vinyl collectors who seek out these records.

Speaker 1 And one group of people who've used this music a ton over the years is hip-hop producers.

Speaker 1 So as you know, there's a long tradition of sampling in hip-hop, especially sampling 70s and 80s funk, R ⁇ B, jazz, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 During the 80s and 90s, hip-hop producers also sampled a lot of popular radio music, often without permission. That was just part of the art form for a good 15 or 20 years.

Speaker 1 But then, of course, the copyright holders started demanding royalties, and there were lots of lawsuits, and the industry really cracked down on sampling pop music. So that's a lot less common now.

Speaker 1 But on the other hand, production music was made specifically to be licensed out and reused and repurposed.

Speaker 1 And of course, licensing some obscure production music record from the 70s is a lot cheaper than trying to license a number one RB RB single from 1978. Right.

Speaker 1 Which is why this stuff gets used so much. So I'm going to do some examples in chronological order of the hip-hop songs themselves.

Speaker 1 I don't know how much you guys listen to hip-hop, but as I play through the original production music track, if you recognize the hip-hop song that it was sampled in, you're welcome to shout it out.

Speaker 1 Okay. So here is a 1973 library track called Look Here, here is spelled H-E-A-R by British composer and guitarist Clive Hicks.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh. Wait, it's um, it's like, did

Speaker 1 it,

Speaker 1 did it, did it, did it.

Speaker 1 You're getting it. Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 2 It's like in my brain. I was going to say Jurassic 5, but I feel like I'm wrong.
You got it.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes.
Let's go.

Speaker 1 So that is sampled by Jurassic 5 in their 2002 track, What's Golden?

Speaker 2 Yes, What's Golden? Yep.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 2 Such a banger.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a great one. All right, next example.
This is from a 1969 French library album called Psych Impressions. The track is called In the Space by Yanko Nilovich and Dave Succi.

Speaker 1 It's very 60s acid rocky.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 This is stumping me.

Speaker 1 I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, from here on, I wouldn't have known any of these, so no worries.
But that was sampled in this 2009 Jay-Z song calling out the overuse of auto-tune in hip-hop.

Speaker 1 It's called D-O-A, which stands for Death of Auto-Tune. This is anti-auto-tune, death of the ringtone.

Speaker 5 This ain't for iTunes, this ain't for sing-alongs.

Speaker 5 Get your chain took in.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure what to do. Wow.

Speaker 1 All right, next one is a library track by our man Dick Walter of Shock Horror Fame.

Speaker 1 10 years before he made the first Editor's Companion album, he put out this groovy song called Shifting Sands of Sound.

Speaker 2 I have no idea. It sounds like something like MF Doom would sample creatively, but I have no idea what it's actually in.

Speaker 1 Totally. That's a good guess.
So in 2011, that was sampled on the debut album of one of the most influential rappers of the modern era, Kendrick Lamar, with his song, Hole Up.

Speaker 2 Kendrick Lamar is so good.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry to everyone out there who's just disgusted with

Speaker 1 us right now. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 It's all right. It's not our expertise.
That's okay.

Speaker 2 My hip-hop expertise is definitely like the 80s to 90s and drops off sharply

Speaker 1 in the 2000s.

Speaker 1 All right. The next one is a 1970 track from an Italian group called the Blue Sharks with their track Itinerario Romantico, which means romantic itinerary.

Speaker 1 And who doesn't love a good romantic itinerary? Okay, I love that so much.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Nope. It's delightful, though.
Sorry, everybody.

Speaker 1 So, 45 years later, that was sampled for this song by Travis Scott. This is a song called 90210.

Speaker 1 I am feeling like an old man.

Speaker 1 I don't see it.

Speaker 1 All right, last one in this section. So this is a 1973 track called Liquid Sunshine by British composer John Cameron.

Speaker 1 Ooh, I recognize this. Ooh.

Speaker 2 I don't.

Speaker 1 It's down there. I just don't.
I don't have it. Tell me if this helps.
If you speed it up and add a drum beat to it, you get this single from the rapper whose legal name is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II.

Speaker 1 Incredible. Sir Robert Bryson Hall II.
Apparently, that's his actual birth name. I'm obsessed with this.
Okay. I saw a read a discussion that was like, how is his name, sir?

Speaker 1 He's American and he's not a knight. And they're like, his parents just literally put sir at the top of his name.
Gosh, that's a real workaround.

Speaker 1 So the answer is logic oh logic's real name is sir robert bryson hall ii oh that's so cool and his song is called like whoa

Speaker 1 there are literally thousands of these hip-hop examples there's a great website called whosampled.com that shows what songs were sampled and what tracks.

Speaker 1 And you can filter by production music and you'll see over a thousand vintage production music tracks and then each one of those lists anywhere from one to several dozen hip-hop songs that sampled that particular track.

Speaker 1 So it really is this like bottomless well of material that hip-hop producers can draw from. But it's not just them who find modern uses for these tracks.
It's also filmmakers and TV producers.

Speaker 1 So here is a piece of vintage production music that I know you have heard and will recognize. So just go ahead and shout it out as soon as you recognize it.
Oh boy. Okay.

Speaker 1 Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yay.

Speaker 1 No way. Is it really? That was production music.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, that's incredible.

Speaker 1 So that's the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a track called Frolic by the Italian composer Luciano Michellini.

Speaker 1 It was written for a 1974 Italian film called La Bellissima Estate, which means the beautiful summer. And yum.

Speaker 1 I found the scene on YouTube where this song plays, but it wasn't subtitled, so it was hard to really get the full context.

Speaker 1 But in the scene, there's a bunch of kids running around a neighborhood, and this, you know, quirky upbeat track is playing. And then they bring some fish to a guy who lives in a shack on the beach.

Speaker 1 Great. And they gift him with some fish so that he'll tell them a fun story.
And then they all sit down and he's like doing this dramatic story for them to listen to.

Speaker 1 So the soundtrack to that film was owned by RCA Records in Italy. They sold the rights to a production music company called Killer Tracks, which was eventually acquired by Universal.

Speaker 1 So now I'm going to play you a clip from an interview with Larry David in the curb cast at the Paley Center for Media. Larry's talking about how he first heard the song in the mid-90s.

Speaker 3 I was watching television about five years ago and there was a bank commercial.

Speaker 1 I thought, boy, I love that.

Speaker 1 Where'd they get that from?

Speaker 1 So, according to Larry, the commercial ran for a week, and then he never saw it again, and he didn't know how to get a hold of the music. So.

Speaker 3 I had my assistant research it. I said, there's this bank commercial.
I forgot the name of the bank. And

Speaker 3 then it became this whole ordeal to get the name of the bank and the music. And finally, she tracked it down, and I had the name, and I sat on the name four years.

Speaker 1 And then when he was coming up with the idea for Kerb Your Enthusiasm, he realized that tuba heavy circusy sound would be a great fit.

Speaker 3 It just sort of introduces the idea that you're in for something pretty idiotic.

Speaker 2 That's amazing. That's exactly what I was thinking as you were playing those clips.
It almost sets you up for the like buffoonery to come. It's very self-aware in a great way.

Speaker 1 Totally. And they built the whole soundtrack around that.

Speaker 1 So when they started working on the show, the music supervisor of Curb went back to Killer Tracks, which had this particular song and asked them for more material along those lines.

Speaker 1 And they gave him 70 CDs worth of music. Oh my God.
And according to him, that's where around 70% of the show's music came from.

Speaker 1 So one of the CDs they got was from a library album called Circus Cartoons Comedy. And here is one track from it called Amusement by Italian composer Franco Michalizzi.

Speaker 2 Oh, I totally recognize that. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 Larry's feeling good. He's like gallivanting around LA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's walking down the street. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Another thing I'm thinking about as you were playing that too is the tuba as shorthand for goofiness or awkwardness or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, totally. It works perfectly for that.
I wonder if tuba players feel annoyed that people think it's like a goofy. Yeah, they're like, I think

Speaker 1 it's like a beautiful, heart-wrenching ballad on my tuba, if you would only let me.

Speaker 1 And then here is another track from that same CD, from the same composer. This one's called The Puzzle.

Speaker 1 So this is like when Larry is doing that thing where he's trying to figure out if someone's lying and he's looking at them suspiciously and they're kind of looking each other up and down, trying to figure out who's lying.

Speaker 1 And then it kind of ends, and he goes, Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's so good.

Speaker 1 So, along with those circusy tracks, Kerb also has some spaghetti western music that also came from music libraries. So, the spaghetti western stuff plays in scenes that feature Susie.

Speaker 1 If you're not familiar, Susie is the wife of Larry's manager, Jeff. She is hilariously intense and frequently furious at Larry and Jeff.

Speaker 1 And when she's about to unload on them, they'll often play this track.

Speaker 1 I just can't hear that without thinking of Susie spewing a beautiful monologue of curse words at Jeff and Larry.

Speaker 1 So that one is a track called For Whom the Bell Tolls by Italian composer Gianni Ferrio. And there's one last track from Curb that I want to play you.
It's another spaghetti western style track.

Speaker 1 But tell me if this sounds like anything else outside of what you've heard on Kirby Enthusiasm.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Makes me think of a Quentin Tarantino film. Sure.
Yeah. He likes to do it.
He totally does.

Speaker 2 Yeah, very killbill-esque.

Speaker 1 Does that ring any bells?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 Somewhere.

Speaker 2 I feel like my brain is grasping, but yeah, somewhere deep.

Speaker 1 So, anyway, when I first heard it, I was like, is that Crazy by Narls Barkley? Is that like an instrumental version of Crazy?

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I remember when I remember. No way.

Speaker 1 That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it turns out that it's a track called In the Tucson Cemetery from a 1968 spaghetti western called Django Prepare a Coffin, composed by two brothers, Gianfranco and Giampiero Reverberi.

Speaker 1 It was later put on a production music compilation and retitled Last Men Standing. And then many years later, Narls Barkley sampled it for crazy.
Whoa.

Speaker 1 And also used parts of the trumpet melody as the vocal melody. And because of that, those two Italian composers are credited as co-writers on Crazy.
Wow. Really proud of Italy.
Yeah, right?

Speaker 1 They're showing up for this. Great job.
Great work, everyone. Italians.
You know what is up.

Speaker 2 Is that why it's called a spaghetti western? Yep.

Speaker 1 It refers to Westerns made in Italy in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 2 Okay, the more you know. I just, I was like, wait a second.

Speaker 1 Is that why? Yep.

Speaker 1 After the break, another modern sitcom that's full of vintage production music. Plus, the 70s library track that Quentin Tarantino brought back into style.

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Speaker 1 Congratulations to Daniel Margulius for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

Speaker 1 That's the sound of an imp being defeated in the original Doom game. That sound effect is from a Lucasfilm sound library in a set of camel vocalizations.
Here are a few more.

Speaker 1 And here's this episode's mystery sound.

Speaker 1 If you know that sound, tell us at the web address mystery.20k.org. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000Hz t-shirt.

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Speaker 1 All right, so that concludes our curb section, but there's another sitcom that does something really similar. And once again, you'll definitely recognize it.

Speaker 1 So just shout it out as soon as you know what it is.

Speaker 1 It's always sunny.

Speaker 1 Yep. Love it.
No way. Always sunny.

Speaker 1 That is a production music track called Temptation Sensation by the German composer Heinz Keisling.

Speaker 1 I couldn't find the exact year it was recorded, but based on his career, it would have been in the 60s or 70s.

Speaker 1 And in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Charlie Day said that the original pilot of Always Sunny actually took place in Los Angeles, which is interesting to think about since, you know, Philly is obviously such a core part of the show.

Speaker 1 Totally. So in that LA-based pilot episode, they used a different theme song, which was inspired by the city of LA.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's good.

Speaker 1 So that's a cha-cha version of the song Hooray for Hollywood, which is from a 1937 musical called Hollywood Hotel. Here's what the original Hooray for Hollywood sounds like.

Speaker 6 Hooray for Hollywood.

Speaker 6 That's gooey bally, hooly hollywood.

Speaker 1 It's a pretty famous showbiz tune, an instrumental version of that song plays in the closing credits of the Academy Awards.

Speaker 1 But according to Charlie Day, FX loved their pilot episode, but they wanted to take out the Hollywood element, and that's why they moved the setting to Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 And for the music, Charlie asked their music supervisor for everything he had that was, quote, leave it to Beaver in a big band swing kind of feel.

Speaker 1 Very specific request. Yeah, for real.
So their music supervisor came back with a bunch of vintage library tracks, and that's what they use for most of the show.

Speaker 1 For example, here's a song called Off Broadway by another German composer, Werner Tauts.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh.
Wow.

Speaker 2 No way. This is blowing my mind.

Speaker 1 So Charlie Day wanted to use that last track as the show's theme song, but FX's president at the time really loved Temptation Sensation, the one that actually became the theme and put his foot down.

Speaker 1 But yeah, most of the music in the show is from those two German composers, Keisling and Tautz. Here's one more from Keisling called Blue Blood.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 It's like hard to not see it in the show or like hear it with the show. It's amazing to me.

Speaker 1 And then one more from Touts called Derby Day.

Speaker 2 Another thing that's funny to me about this is that the music sounds so wholesome. Yeah, and the show is the complete opposite.

Speaker 2 So there's just this hilarious juxtaposition happening, which like really works.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that contrast is a big part of what makes it work so well.

Speaker 1 To me, it's paralleling how hip-hop artists use it it's like the ultimate collaboration of like i'm gonna take your original creation and then i'm gonna overlay my own artistic interpretation over that and it's gonna create this whole other thing the vibe of it or what the result is it's so cool all right we've reached the last segment this one's maybe my favorite because i'm such a movie nerd oh my god This final track is written by British composer Keith Mansfield, who is a legend in the world of production music.

Speaker 1 He wrote a ton of music for the company KPM, and specifically he made a number of songs that became sports themes in England.

Speaker 1 So there was a show there called Grandstand, which was the BBC's flagship sports program, and they used this Keith Mansfield track as their theme for 30 years or so.

Speaker 1 I feel like sports themes were a lot more wholesome back then.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a lot more like levity than what we have now, I feel like.

Speaker 1 It's a little bit more of like, hey, everyone, this is a game, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Now it's like, intense sports for guys. Are you ready to rock some competition? Get your beer and hop wings, cause it's sports time.

Speaker 1 Saturday, Saturday, Saturday.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. Yeah, another wholesome one is a soccer show called The Big Match that ran from the 60s to the 90s.
They used one of Keith's tracks as their opening theme song.

Speaker 1 I love the bins.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's so good.
That, I mean, just the interpretation on that, though.

Speaker 1 Somebody's like, for soccer, or I guess football, they'd be like, this works, but I'm not exactly sure where they were mentally. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 i agree and the track is called young scene which to me feels like a much more accurate like it sounds like some 60s teenagers bopping at a pool party you know right totally

Speaker 1 yeah so keith was in the right headspace for a young scene but someone was like no football

Speaker 1 and he's like i'll take the check right yeah one more of these sports ones this is for the bbc's coverage of the wimbledon tennis championships they used a keith manfield track called light and tuneful

Speaker 1 There's more bins.

Speaker 1 I love that title, Light and Tuneful. Light and Tuneful.
It sounds like a polite British person asking how you'd like your tea, but instead they're asking you how you'd like your music.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, how do you like your music? Oh, light and tuneful, please. Oh, certainly, dear.
Light and tuneful it shall be.

Speaker 1 I feel like everyone is like playing tennis on their tippy toes or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Keith Mansfield also wrote a song that was used in a series of snipes. Now, a snipe is a movie industry term for anything that plays on the screen before a movie that is not a trailer.

Speaker 1 So it could be a no-smoking message or refreshments are available in the lobby. These days, there's, of course, the silence your cell phones.
Is this going to be the banner, bam, bam, banny, bam?

Speaker 1 I think you know where this is going. Like the go-get your hot dogs.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, actually, no, not the hot dog thing, but it's along the same lines. So, if a snipe lists a specific date for something that's happening at the theater, it's called a dater.

Speaker 1 So, there is a specific set of snipes or daters that are kind of famous.

Speaker 1 They were created in 1968 by the National Screen Service, a company that had a monopoly on the distribution of trailers and movie posters in the U.S. for many, many years.

Speaker 1 These snipes are often called the Astro Daters, and they're also known as the Grindhouse Bumpers.

Speaker 1 These snipes were used pretty widely in America in the 70s, so if you were going to a Grindhouse theater or a drive-in theater, you'd often see these snipes before the movie.

Speaker 1 They had a very distinctive look, and they were all set to a Keith Mansfield song called Funky Fanfare.

Speaker 1 Yep, that's it.

Speaker 1 I don't think this was the go-get the hot dog one because this was like right before the film and it was getting you in the in the right headspace.

Speaker 1 It's like don't disturb people around you type of vibe from what I remember. Well, I just want to show you the visual look of it.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to send you a link on Slack to a YouTube video and then maybe Dallas, you can describe what the visuals look like. Okay.
Okay, so there's the link.

Speaker 1 Okay, it's a lot of words. Previews of coming attractions.

Speaker 2 Preview V-U-E-S.

Speaker 1 Pre-vous of coming attractions.

Speaker 2 It looks like we're inside a lava lamp, is the best way I can describe it.

Speaker 1 Oh, and then it kind of explodes out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's this kind of swirly, colorful psychedelic background, and the words are kind of coming in from the edge of the screen.

Speaker 1 And then there were a bunch of others that looked basically the same, but said things like, our feature presentation, or no smoking in this theater, or starts Friday.

Speaker 1 And they all used the same track, Funky Fanfare. But these Astro daters have become emblematic of that 70s grindhouse and exploitation movie era.

Speaker 1 And Quentin Tarantino, who grew up in the 70s watching hundreds of those kinds of movies and then went on to make films heavily inspired by those kinds of movies, he used one of the Astro Dators at the start of Kill Bill Volume 1.

Speaker 1 So at the beginning of that film, it plays the feature presentation Astro Dator that we just watched. No way.
And he also used it.

Speaker 1 in the double feature that he did with Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse with the movies Planet Terror and Deathproof.

Speaker 1 And then Robert Rodriguez used it at the start of Machete Kills, which was kind of like an offshoot of Grindhouse.

Speaker 1 And then finally, since 2007, Tarantino has owned a movie theater in LA, a historic theater called The New Beverly.

Speaker 1 And he's in charge of all the programming and plays a lot of movies that were influential to him. And before every movie they run, they'll play one of these Astro Daters.

Speaker 1 They have one of the original prints of it on film in a canister, you know, that they run through their projector and kick off the movie that way. Oh, cool.
They're awesome.

Speaker 1 There's a few perfect things, but this is a a perfect track for getting yourself in the movie headspace. Yeah, totally.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But then finally, Danger Doom, which consisted of Danger Mouse and MF Doom, they sampled Funky Fanfare in a track of theirs featuring Talib Quali called Old School Rules.

Speaker 5 And it might be fucking but it seemed to me that caught two will be real than reality TV. Players by my decision to be open and listen before.
Got it all twisted like a yoga position.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so before we leave Keith Mansfield behind, I just want to play you a quote from him.

Speaker 1 The PRX show Studio 360 interviewed Keith Mansfield about writing production music, and he had a great bit about why it appealed to him so much, which I think is probably applicable to many of the other composers who were doing the same thing.

Speaker 1 So here's Keith.

Speaker 7 The whole thing about the live music, it may not have had the glamour of being a film composer or of being a pop star or whatever, but that's not what I wanted.

Speaker 7 I mean, I just wanted the opportunity to be all the different people I could be as a composer. I could be serious, I could be humorous, humorous.
I could be evil. I could be nice and innocent.

Speaker 7 I could do anger music. I do all sorts of things.
So that was very fulfilling as a composer. And it kept me interested for my whole musical lifetime.

Speaker 1 That's so cool. Yeah, right? It sounds like a fun job.

Speaker 2 It makes total sense to me too.

Speaker 2 It's like, if you don't want to be pigeonholed into one genre or like one identity your whole life, it makes total sense that you'd want to be sort of like a musical chameleon and do production music.

Speaker 1 It's so cool. I want to hear Hans Zimmer's wholesome wake up in the morning and eat your breakfast cereal music.
Me too.

Speaker 1 Well, we've reached the conclusion. I have just a few closing questions for you.
We use several modern music libraries to score this podcast.

Speaker 1 How do you think the music in the libraries we use compares to the stuff we've been talking about today?

Speaker 1 What really jumps out to me is the obvious use of real instruments and real musicians. Totally.

Speaker 1 Everything I've heard just sounds sounds like real people who wrote sheet music and then got a group together or had a scoring session or a small session of musicians and then recorded it in one take because everyone's really good.

Speaker 1 And I guess that now a lot of production music is so singular and quantized

Speaker 1 and click-tracked and in the box that I don't want to hate on it because there's some really amazing stuff that's being done by individuals with plugins.

Speaker 1 But it's a little bit of just like one step into AI where now AI is making it so obviously soulless and in the uncanny valley so deeply. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you hear so much human soul behind all of these tracks. Yeah.
Every single instrument, every single breath, every single groove on all fronts is like so human.

Speaker 1 Another difference I thought about is that most modern libraries don't have house composers and house musicians on staff anymore.

Speaker 1 A few of them will apparently commission music from specific composers, but most libraries today are basically distribution platforms where independent artists can license out their music. Right.

Speaker 1 So it's just not as much of a full-time job option as it used to be, unless you're lucky enough to get hired by a film scoring company or a trailer music company, which do exist. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So yeah, tons of killer music. Some of it has been digitized, but I imagine probably a lot of it still hasn't.

Speaker 1 So I just think it's tantalizing to think about the undiscovered records that are out there somewhere just waiting to be sampled in some awesome hip-hop track or used as the theme song to a new sitcom or used in some grindhouse-y, throwback-y movie.

Speaker 1 I just wonder with all the stuff that we recognize, how much exists that just never got used. All this human music with real people

Speaker 1 that's just living on a vinyl record in somebody's grandparents' garage. For real.

Speaker 1 So I had two goals today. Number one was to convince you that vintage production music is awesome.

Speaker 1 And number two was to demonstrate that this 50-plus-year-old music is still actually really relevant to creators today. So have I achieved those goals?

Speaker 2 I feel like both boxes get a big check for me. I loved it.

Speaker 1 Great. You get a saxophone and a green check mark emoji.
Ooh.

Speaker 1 Nice. Put that in my email signature, show it off.

Speaker 1 I know that's a deep cut, and nobody would understand what that means on the podcast.

Speaker 1 Basically, most of my reactions in Slack is either a green check mark, got it, or a saxophone, which is kind of, I just imagine Kenny G wailing with pure joy.

Speaker 1 We're all jamming together. Like, we're moving, we're grooving.
It is. It's like synchronicity.
Yeah. I don't think we've ever talked about this before.
No. This is really delightful.

Speaker 1 Some deep 20K lore going on

Speaker 1 in the pod.

Speaker 1 20,000 Hertz is produced by my sound agency, DeFacto Sound. If you'd like to work with Grace and I, get in touch by emailing hi at de factosound.com.

Speaker 1 This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerlyn. With help from Grace East, it was sound design and mixed by Jade Dickey.mp3.

Speaker 1 Over there, I go behind the scenes with the audio crews of SNL, Friday Night Baseball, MeowWolf, Disney Imagineering, and more.

Speaker 1 You can also find clips of these videos on Instagram and TikTok under that same name, dallastaylor.mp3.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening.

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