Recycled Music

[Mofo Rising]

Something odd I noticed while I was watching the new LORD OF THE RINGS preview.  For some reason, during the last half they use one of the themes from REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.  Now it works well for the preview, but if you've seen REQUIEM you start thinking "Hobbits. . . junkies. . . hobbits. . .".  It's an uncomfortable parallel.

Very often a movie will recycle another's music for their trailer.  The BEETLEJUICE theme has been recycled countless times.  Can anybody else think of scores that were used this way?  Or even movies that use another's score for the movie itself?

[Evan3]

Oh yeah, Take the movie Moulin s**t (oops i mean Moulin Rouge) they couldnt write their own songs so they stole other people's (trust me that movie belongs on this site, it is frighteningly bad). Also, how many Scream music paradies float around? Lastly, if you listen for a while, every single John Williams piece of music starts sounding like one song, big and brassy (like part of my anatomy ;-)Mofo Rising wrote:

[J.R.]

I noticed the Requiem music too, and it's fitting, but weird. Two pieces of music used over, and over, and over again in trailers are the themes to Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Dragonheart, both by the excellent composer Randy Edelman. They're very sweeping, gripping scores, usually used to make you think the movies being advertised are dramatic tour de forces, which they usually aren't.

[Neville]

That's common practice, because when the trailer is prepared the music for the movie is still on the works. I've seen many trailers using music from "Dragonheart", and Hans Zimmer music for "Gladiator"  was very fashionable for a while.

[Squishy]

In older B-movies, recycling music was quite common; in seems like almost all of Bert I. Gordon's black-n-white monster flicks have the same Al Glasser score, which was also pasted onto "Varan The Unbelievable" and God knows what else...

A piece from Jerry Goldsmith's unused metallic score for "Judge Dredd" was used in the trailer--and subsequently several other action movie trailers. (That they rejected the Goldsmith score just goes to show the idiot thinking that doomed "Dredd" from the start.)

I hate hearing a nice piece of music in a trailer--or many trailers--that doesn't appear in that particular film...especially when I can't find the source.

[Fearless Freep]

Watching "Freddy's Dead" last night, some of the music seem to be lifted or at leat imitated from "Night On Bald Mountain"

(The rest was a rather weak offering from Brian May)

[Vermin Boy]

"What's This?" from Nightmare Before Christmas seems to have become trailer shorthand for "quirky children's fantasy"; the theme from Brazil, "quirky adult fantasy" (Being John Malkovich, etc.)

If I only had a dime for every movie that used the score from Creature from the Black Lagoon...

[Chadzilla]

Randy Newman's fanfare from The Natural has been used to punctuate soaring triumph montages in sports movie trailers, etc.

Maximum Overdrive used the end title theme from Halloween 3 (called Chariots of Pumpkins on the soundtrack) in its TV commericals.

[Dano]

The helicopter chase theme from the Peacemaker was used in the trailers for Hart's War.

The theme from Crimson Tide has been used in lots of trailers, although Independence Day is the only one that comes to mind.

[Nobody]

 
   The theme song to Conan The Barbarian gets used quite alot in movie trailers and movie commercials as well.

[Andrew]

Speaking of "The Nightmare Before Christmas."  Listen to some of Elfman's scores and you will notice renditions of "Minnie the Moocher."  Off the top of my head, both "TNBXMAS" and "Forbidden Zone" have that tune.  I know that there are more, because a group of us spent about a month finding them in different films.

[John]

After (I think) Terminator II came out, I saw a couple TV ads for other films that used that part of the theme with the rumbling sounds.

Doesn't bother me as much as the piece of crap movie I watched on HBO that lifted the entire Cyberdyne police shootout and inserted shots of a different actor standing in the window.

[Squishy]

I think we could fill an encyclopedia with misuse of A-movie footage in B-movies...

The English-language "love song" at the end of "Godzilla 1985" was replaced in part by music from "Def-Con 4." I don't know if the music originated in "Def" or came from somewhere else...

"Goodbye now Godzilla!
Goodbye now Godzilla!
My old friend...
Sayonara 'til we meet again."
--part of that song

[svbell]

I recall being shocked when I heard Alien III, in the last minutes, shamelessly stealing Terminator
There was also in Mask of Zorro (Banderas) where you can hear the music of The Phantom (Billy Zane)

-sv

[Dano]

How about actual film footage that has been recycled?

Danny Baldwin starred in an AWFUL movie about a ragtag bunch of fighter pilots thrown together for "an impossible mission" ("You keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it means" - Inigo Montoya).  Anyway, they are supposed to be F-15 pilots, but there are scenes of F-16s in the Iron Eagle movies and F-14s from Top Gun.  I think the only original airplane footage in this movie is a few takeoffs and landings, and Danny Baldwin sitting in the cockpit.  I want to say it was called "Blue Thunder" but I am not certain.

Then there was that "Imposter" or "Intruder" movie that starred Gary Sinise as an Earth scientist who was suspected of being an alien spy by Vincent D'Onofrio.  Madeline Stowe was Sinise's wife, and Mekei Pfeiffer was also in it.  At the beginning when they were showing how the alien enemies in this movie had attacked Earth, they stole footage of Paris getting clobbered by an asteroid from "Armageddon" and the ruins of Buenos Aires from "Starship Troopers."

I'm sure there are more examples, but these are the two most flagrant I can think of.