The Music of Jonny Quest

One of the greatest, perhaps THE greatest, action adventure cartoons is "The Adventures of Jonny Quest".

Doug Wildey, working for Hanna-Barbera, created a mature, stylish series that is as thrilling now as when it first aired in 1964. The series is notable for many reasons: the incredible voice over work, the well-rounded characters, exotic locations (drawing Calcutta costs as much as drawing a generic Southern California mountainside or cityscape), the imaginative stories featuring robot-spiders, yetis, mummies, and lizard men.

One of the best things about Jonny Quest is composer Hoyt Curtain's incredible jazz-soaked music. If you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the last 50 years, you know the Jonny Quest theme. The incidental music, which producers Hanna-Barbera often chopped up and tracked into other adventure cartoons they produced, is still thrilling.

One of my most favorite Curtain/Quest pieces of music, with those amazing drumbeats accentuated by horn blasts, can be found at the 1:20 to 2:26 mark below. Another fun piece starts at 4:20 to 5:52.

We can't talk about Quest music without mentioning the amazing, thrill a minute main title theme which just screams "adventure!".

BABY DRIVER Posters Run The Gamut From Cliche to Cool

Great movie poster illustrations are becoming a lost artform.

Here is a quite standard Hollywood poster for the upcoming BABY DRIVER. It's not terrible, with its collage of characters grouped at the top and the slanted angle of the car in the lower half.

Here's an image that could be on a poster, but targets the film's sure-to-be-classic rock song soundtrack. Now THIS is a cool image. It grabs your attention with the graphic of the car zooming out of Baby's ever present iPod.

This next poster I absolutely adore. Simple, clean graphics. No collage, no clutter.

Baby Driver movie and images Copyright 2017 Sony Pictures Digital Productions Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended.

BBC's THE MUSKETEERS Series Main Title Theme

The Musketeers is a great, old-fashioned romantic adventure series, something sadly lacking on American television in these times. Thank goodness the British and the BBC have not forgotten how to deliver. The series Main Title them by Murray Gold is a rousing, footstomping number. Engarde!

A Song to Combat The "Heat Wave "

This has NOTHING to do with science fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, or anything like that.

But it's hot in Los Angeles. Damn hot.

So, here is the classic song "Heat Wave" as sung by the incredible Joan Osborne. She kills it. (For extra fun, the original poster WestLAGuy included the 1960s version by Martha and The Vandellas immediately following Joan's version.)

Copyright 2016 the Respective Rights Owners. No infringement of those rights or the original YouTube poster's rights is intended.

The Music From U.N.C.L.E.

Good grief but there have been so many mediocre big screen movies of late. Every summer seems to be filled with so many turds.

Last year though, there was a gem among the duds in the form of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Director Guy Ritchie and company created a breezy, bouncy, comic action movie, with a solid main cast in Henry Cavill (Solo), Armie Hammer (Kuryakin), and Alicia Vikander (Gaby). I enjoyed the chemistry between these three leads and would very much like to see another adventure. Perhaps the home video and foreign returns will warrant a U.N.C.L.E. sequel. We can only H.O.P.E.

In the meanwhile, here is a great energetic music piece by composer Daniel Pemberton.

Groove to Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy Tunes

It's a brand new year.

I'm going to have to put you on the Game Grid.

Or, maybe you'd rather listen to the Daft Punk soundtrack from Tron: Legacy.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1

Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy is simply the most fun movie to hit theaters in years.  Its soundtrack of classic rock staples only adds to the film's many charms.  Give the tunes a listen, and you'll be groovin' like Dancing Baby Groot in no time.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Star Trek is Copyright 2013 & 2014 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

Godzilla ROARS In 2014!

Move over, Mothra. Cram it, Cloverfield.  And pack it in you Pacific Rim kaijus. The first - and best - giant monster of them all it coming back to the big screen in May 2014. 

We can only be talking about Godzilla.

The new American Godzilla film is directed by Gareth Edwards (the fun low budget scifi movie, Monsters), with a shooting script by Frank Darabont.

This first teaseer trailer is phenomenal.  Serious, smart, great mood and atmosphere, incredibly realistic visual effects.  And, holy crap, that ROAR at the end is - to use a classic Marvel Comics cover blurb - "senses shattering!"  

This movie should rock so f#@%!*& hard!

Here's the teaser from You Tube:

Twizzler Goes Star Trekking

Star Trek.  Twizzlers.

Two great things that boldly go together?  Well, apparently someone thought so, which is why we get this Twizzlers candy ad with a Star Trek TOS Enterprise and theme.

A funny thing, though, is they pattern the "warp effect" after the one used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, not the Original Series, which uses the refit Enterprise and has a different musical theme.  But it works better in the context of the commercial (and it's another way to utilize more Twizzlers in the mix), so we'll let it slide.

Oh, well, it's still fun, with some great visuals.  And Twizzlers are still a sweet treat.

Music Beyond The Stars

Ever see The Seven Samurai In Space?  You may remember it as Battle Beyond The Stars, the Roger Corman-produced scifi movie with John Boy Walton (aka Richard Thomas).

It's one of Corman's better releases, with lots of cool aliens, fun spaceship designs (hey, a starship with boobs!) and a nifty early effort from composer James Horner.  (Trivia fuctoid: James Cameron toiled on the movie first as a lowly model maker, but was quickly promoted to production designer/art director and visual effects supervisor.  Plus, Cameron would later select Horner to score his own films, such as, Aliens, Titanic and Avatar.)

Here's the main title theme, courtesy of YouTube:

Avengers Assemble For The Harlem Shake!

The latest Internet meme of the "Harlem Shake" has been filling up YouTube and the interwebs with its many zany dance (if you can call it that) interpretations.

I dig this one by YouTuber SpastikChuwawa with tiny Lego Avengers:

Music For A Sci-Fi Friday

You like your sci-fi movies/TV shows.

You like your music videos.

Squish them together and you get stuff like Tom Petty's "You Got Lucky," featuring the great Sandman ground car from the short-lived Logan's Run TV show, dusty desert locations and stock footage from Galactica: 1980 (which was just footage from the disaster flick Earthquake combined with Cylon Raider spaceship blasting clips from Battlestar Galactica).

You also get Rick Springfield's  sci-fi headscratcher, "Bop Til You Drop."  Whose idea was it to pair the clean cut Springfield and his upbeat pop tune with a grungy, dystopic future setting, replete with decent miniature models (inspired by the movie Dune?), Metropolis-like slave workers, mutant makeup jobs and Rick's future-mullet?

U.F.O. T.H.E.M.E.

Do you remember a tv series called UFO?  It was produced by the great Gerry Anderson of Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 fame.

UFO followed the adventures of the secret organization called S.H.A.D.O. (ten quatloos if you can recall what that acronym stands for) as it monitored and defended earth from alien attackers.

UFO featured nifty future fashions, and tons of cool miniature effects courtesy of the late, great Derek Meddings and modelmaker extraordinare Martin Bower.  There was the Moonbase and their Interceptor spacecraft (they look a bit like early versions of BSG's Viper fighters), the orbiting S.I.D. (Space Intruder Detector), the mighty Mobiles and lest we forget, the incredible SkyDiver submarine with detachable Sky 1 fighter.

Oh, this shit rocked.

UFO also had one of the snazziest theme songs out there, composed by Barry Gray.  So put on your go-go boots (and purple wigs) and lets go hunt aliens.  I'll fire up the Interceptors.

Retro Robots