6 Famous Movie Composers Who Slummed It in Silly Projects
Assuming you haven’t bought tickets to the symphony lately, your only exposure to classical music has been hearing it as the score playing in the background of movies. In that sense, musically, that stupid superhero movie you watched might just be the highest form of art you’ve experienced all year.
Those movies are going to be the absolute pinnacle of any composer’s career. Before that, they’ll be doing even sillier stuff, and that goes equally for the most famous composers of all.
John Williams Did the Original Theme Song to ‘Gilligan’s Island’
In the 20 years after 1976, four new movies broke the record for highest-grossing movie of all-time: Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Jurassic Park. All four of them were scored by John Williams. But a decade before the earliest of those four, Williams was enlisted to write the theme song to a TV show — a new series called Gilligan’s Island.
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Oh, Williams didn’t write “The Ballad of Gillgan’s Island,” the theme song that’s well known today, even by people who haven’t watched a single episode. He wrote a theme song that was used in the original pilot but was dropped afterward, which is a whole other level of indignity.
Williams went with a calypso beat for that song. The producers of the show later realized this made no sense because the characters don’t set off from the Caribbean for their original tour; they set off from Hawaii. And so, Williams’ composition was jettisoned, as was the other incidental music he wrote for the show. You can listen to his song now to compare it to the one you know. While the story it tells is different in some ways, it retains one crucial element: listing a few characters before running out of time and saying “and then there were some others.”
James Horner Did the Show ‘Fish Police’
In the 20 years after that last 20-year period we mentioned, two new movies broke the record for highest-grossing movie of all-time: Titanic and Avatar. Both were scored by James Horner. He, too, had some less impressive early TV credits, including an animated fish police procedural for CBS.
That’s right — Fish Police, for those unlucky enough to have missed it, was a 1992 show about a police precinct that happens to be under the ocean and staffed by fish. The Simpsons was a hit, and other networks were rushing to imitate it, but when they thought “animation,” they thought “anthropomorphic animals.” So, NBC got Capitol Critters (what if the White House were staffed by animals?), and CBS got Fish Police.
Besides Horner doing the music, the show boasted a voice cast that included Tim Curry, John Ritter, Megan Mullally and Ed Asner. It lasted just six episodes, which many experts say is fewer episodes than The Simpsons has put out.
Howard Shore Was a Beekeeper on ‘SNL’
Shore wrote the music for The Lord of the Rings, which is such an accomplishment that we’re not even going to summarize the dozens of other movies he’s scored in two decades before that.
Before he scored his first movie, he was the musical director for Saturday Night Live. Occasionally, that meant appearing onscreen during sketches, such as in the following performance of “King Bee.” That’s Shore conducting, his head covered in a mask because he’s a beekeeper.
We could explain for you why John Belushi is dressed as a bee, sharing with you an entire history of the SNL bees, but that’s another thing we’ll choose not to summarize. Frankly, we think additional context can only hurt this performance.
Hans Zimmer Is in MTV’s First Music Video
The first music video that MTV ever aired was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. For a while, this was common knowledge. Then came a generation who’d hear this fact and ask, “But how can a song talk about the rise of music videos if MTV didn’t exist before that?”
That generation, who didn’t realize the title refers to the rise of TV rather than music videos, was followed by a generation who’d hear the fact and reply by joking, “Wait, MTV used to play music videos?” They, in turn were succeeded by a generation who’d ask, “But I thought pivot-to-video didn’t ravage the industry until the 2010s.”
A few seconds into the video, you’ll see someone banging on a synthesizer. That’s a 23-year-old Hans Zimmer.
This was years before he had any other credits, and the chance of that German musician becoming a household name must have seemed slim. But he went on to score Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight and so many other movies that he definitely runs a music factory staffed by clones. Trevor Horn of The Buggles also claims that he wrote a rap for Zimmer to perform as part of the song, but he’s probably just joking about that.
Danny Elfman Is the Guy Yelling ‘Weird Science’
Speaking of knowledge that was once commonplace, some of you will be thoroughly familiar with the fact that Danny Elfman was the front man for Oingo Boingo. Others among you will be saying, “Oingo Boingo? That’s not a real name for a band. You clearly just made that up.”
But Oingo Boingo was real and was how Danny Elfman first became famous. The Oingo Boingo song you’re most likely to know would be “Weird Science,” from the movie of the same name.
Danny Elfman didn’t do the score for Weird Science — he just did that song. Then he went on to do so many film scores that he’s now credited with over 100 albums, which is altogether too many albums for anyone.
John Barry Did a ‘Lolita’ Musical
Barry’s most famous composition is surely the James Bond theme. He also won Oscars for four other films that he scored. But in 1971, he found himself roped in by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to compose a musical called Lolita, My Love.
It would be an adaptation of Lolita and you might have trouble imagining how such a story would translate to a musical, but that’s because you lack the vision of Barry and Lerner. For example, Humbert can pursue Lolita through the medium of song like this:
I'll buy you anything, sandals and jeans
Perfume, potato chips and movie magazines
I'll buy you roller skates, suncream from France
Popcorn and Cracker Jacks and cotton velvet pants
Tell me, tell me everything you crave
Let me, let me play the game of slave
They got a 12-year-old actress to play Lolita in this production. While some might say that’s true to the story (truer than the Kubrick adaptation, where they aged the character up), Vladimir Nabokov himself had said making an actual 12-year-old play the part onstage would crazy, and he’d never allow it. The public didn’t take kindly to Lolita, My Love, and it shut down before it reached Broadway.
In 2019, the musical did return to New York briefly. This time, an actress in her 20s played the part of the girl. It turns out that people are able to play roles other than what they literally are, using this thing called acting.
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