Friday Double: (13) Stormy baseball edition

There's so much to say about Hurricane Sandy, but apart from the new tagline in this blog's header, I'll limit myself to a couple of comments.

1. Any elected official who's acted the way leaders should in a disaster like this gets a big win this week.  President Obama and New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whom I otherwise don't like) get high marks for dropping the party labels and just getting to work.
2. On the other hand, Mitt Romney can add "loser" to an impressive list that already includes "liar," "thief," and "biohazard disposal bag."  Smooth move with those cans from Walmart, Money Boo Boo.
3. In the middle, where he always looks comfortable as a cat in a box, sits another bag of money, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Ordering shelters and cabbies to let evacuees take their pets was cool.  Keeping the New York Marathon going this weekend when so much of the city needs that event's resources?  Not so much.

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Sergio Romo and the Giants win the National League pennant,
in glorious San Francisco rain.
[Getty Images/Ezra Shaw]

On a much smaller scale, baseball had a couple of notable events this week, and they're the focus of this Friday Double.

Yay! Giants!  There's something exhilarating about watching bad weather roll in just as your favorite outdoor team wraps up a convincing semifinal victory.  Back in early 1986, at the end of the NFC Championship, that incipient snow that fell on Soldier Field was the best part of the fumble recovery that Bears used to finish off the then-Los Angeles Rams.  A couple of weeks ago, I felt the same warmth as the Giants reveled in the rain that helped them dismiss the St. Louis Cardinals.

As I keep telling friends and family here in exurban Chicago, my ten-year stay in California led me to, among other things, defect from the Cubs to the San Francisco Giants.  The only bad thing about their Game 4 win in Detroit last Sunday -- and the World Series title that came from it -- was that the ninth inning conflicted with The Venture Brothers Halloween special.  Lots of unnecessary clicking took place.

Key to my eventual conversion to a Giants fan was the construction of the their waterfront stadium in 2000.  Back when it opened, it was called "Pacific Bell Park," but then PacBell went through so many mergers.  Every acquisition caused the official name of the venue to change, so by the time it became "AT&T Park," I just gave up.  Because it's so compact, I've taken to calling it just "The Phone Booth of Doom."

The real charm of attending Giants home games is getting to The Phone Booth of Doom.  Sure, you can drive, but it's a lot more fun to take BART to either the Embarcadero or Montgomery stop.  From there, the quickest way is to take the N-Judah.  The most fun way, though, is to walk the dozen or so blocks to the park.  That way, if my friends and I decided we were thirsty, we could stop off at any of the numerous watering holes on the way.  If not, the exercise is always useful.

This aspect of going to the game wasn't lost on the Giants organization, which put out a memorable ad that managed to sell both The Phone Booth itself and the experience of walking through San Francisco's South of Market district to get there.  Petula Clark's "Downtown" provided the background music, and it fit like a glove:



¡Felicidades a los Gigantes!

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Remembering Pascual "Perimeter" Pérez:  It was sad to hear of his murder this week.  I remember him less for his actual Major League Baseball career (which ended up being riddled with drug problems) than for the timing of his arrival in the majors 30 years ago.  Cable television was becoming the norm throughout the U.S., and Atlanta's Channel 17, WTBS, was turning the Braves into everyone's second team.  To believe announcer Skip Caray was to buy into the notion that Pérez would lead the Braves into either the Promised Land or the NLCS, whichever was closer.

The Braves had just called Pérez up, and he was scheduled to start at grand old Fulton County Stadium.  Still unfamiliar with Atlanta-area geography, he missed a freeway turn, and ended up taking a couple of trips around the city.  It was comical. [Not least because I doubt that, were someone to suddenly teleport me to Santo Domingo one morning and tell me to get to the stadium by 13:00 that day, I'd do a whole lot better.]  From then on, he became Pascual "Perimiter" Pérez.

Anyway, this 1980s classic form Dead or Alive came to mind when I heard the news about him.

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Friday Double: (12) Odd notes from Euro 2012

It's been interesting to watch the amazing amount of influence that the English-speaking world has wielded at the Euro 2012 tournament.  Stadium announcements in English have been a FIFA standard for several World Cup cycles, so hearing those again in Poland and Ukraine came as no surprise. On the other hand, as the Russian national anthem played before the Russia-Poland match, there was this:

'Cause racist taunts and marches on Warsaw weren't provocative enough.
[Reuters/Pascal Lauener]

Never mind the 45th-level D&D warlord, who, Russian state network RT tells us, is a heroic figure from Russian history. The important part here is the caption. I can understand why PA announcers are using English, but why would a group of Russian fans use English on that banner? Why not regular Russian, or even Russian transliterated into Latin characters? Are that many Americans blowing off Miami-Oklahoma City for this?

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And how about the music?

You may have not heard "Kernkraft 400" referenced by name, but if you've watched East Coast college football at any time during the Obama administration, you've probably heard fans singing caterwauling along with it.

Alas, it's made its way to the PA systems at Euro 2012, and through to the fans. "Kernkraft 400" isn't just about the worst fight song ever, it's one of the worst techno tracks I've ever heard.  Heck, it's not even original; the appropriately named Zombie Nation, a German group, stole it from a Commodore 64 game.  How Canadian hockey fans (yes, Canadians) managed to turn this German annoyance into a global one is beyond me.

Anyhow, here's a sports mix, because my alternative today was the was the Hymn of the Russian Federation.  Feel free to gong this at any time.

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Even more interesting than chants imported from eastern North America is what plays when the contestants enter the field for the first time. The first time I paid attention to the background music, before the Germany-Portugal match, I thought immediately of Mass Effect 2, perhaps the first video game to ever run a Super Bowl ad. A little digging confirmed my suspicion: the score for that trailer was original to that ad, and it's what the Euro 2012 honchos are using to introduce teams to the playing field:



"Heart of Courage" is a nice, simple tune that does exactly as composer Two Steps from Hell intended: it builds dramatic tension just quickly enough to create an appetite. It works the same for Euro 2012 games as it did for that video game. And like the English-captioned Russian banner and the ridiculous fight tune, it points to increasing American influence on non-American events.

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Friday Double: (11) Remember these

Elmer Bernstein is another of my favorite film composers, and his theme from the 1962 movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird has recently gotten quite a bit of play on the Streaming Soundtracks site.  While some of the folks who've requested it might have also been mulling the Trayvon Martin case, it's more than pretty enough to stand on its own.

Here's an odd thought I've always had about Bernstein:  Even though his résumé covered a much wider range of movie genres, I tended to associate him with action films like The Ten Commandments (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1960), or later comedies like Animal House (1978) and Ghostbusters (1984).  It fell to TCM host Robert Osborne, only a few years ago, to notify me that Bernstein also penned To Kill a Mockingbird.  It still surprises me, even though Bernstein himself considered this one of his most important works.

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Walter Schumann is best remembered as the composer of the Dragnet theme, but it's another, completely different work of his that's always come to my mind.  When I was very young, The Night of the Hunter (1955) was my favorite movie.  It aired on local television when I was two or three, at the age when most of us start keeping memories.  Its signature scene, as young John and Pearl Harper first escape the clutches of Reverend Powell*, is one of the first things I actually remembered.

Part of that has to do with the way the escape is shot.  Even casual inspection exposes elements of the scenes as unrealistic.  Spider webs don't hang this way, the sun doesn't rise or set like that.  But the sequence remains convincing despite all the unreality, because Schumann's music meshes so well with the visuals.  Now that I've had several chances to watch this as an adult, I still feel as though I'm witnessing the escape, not through John's eyes or Pearl's, but through those of a spectral third child.

What makes the movie truly great, though, is the "Lullaby."  Weary, scared, and still desperate to avoid capture, John and Pearl hide in a barn for the night.  All the while, a voice tries to sing them to sleep.  Here's the end of the escape, my first cinematic memory.




* Here's one reason why neither Palpatine nor Darth Vader made it past Episode XI of the Star Wars cycle:  they didn't bother to study Robert Mitchum's portrayal of Rev. Powell.  I'm hard put to imagine a villain as monstrous, clever or effective as Powell, but I'd bet a few credits that Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi both got hold of a Night of the Hunter DVD.

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Friday Double: (10) They might be edifying

Sorry I'm late.  This year's last two World Series games made me care about baseball (beyond the Giants and Athletics) again.  Congratulations to both the Cardinals and the Rangers for two determined, resilient efforts.  Anyway, here's a roundabout way to introduce this week's selections.

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I really like soccer commentator Jorge Ramos's* English-language work.  He knows both North American and South American fútbol really well, and ESPN's coverage since August (when he crossed over from ESPN Deportes) has improved as a result.  As an English speaker, he can easily hold conversations, and his diction has improved dramatically, but his phrasing style makes it clear that (a) Spanish is his native language and (b) he didn't grow up in North America.  [He's Uruguayan.]

That little annoyance reminded me that English, especially its American dialects, has a lot of weird rules that don't occur in other languages.  For example, in English, several words can be used as both nouns and verbs.  That rule even applies to really popular brand names, like "Xerox" and "Google."

While I doubt that Pete Townshend ever intended to create a song just for ESL students, "Face the Face" would be a great song to hear for someone who's learning English as an adult.  Besides its snazzy music and lush instrumentation, its lyrics are full of words being used as both nouns and verbs.  Here's part of a verse:

We've got to judge the judge
We got to find the finds
We've got to scheme the schemes
We got to line the lines
We got to fight the fight
We got to fall the falls
We got to light the light
We got to call the calls
Try to place the place
Where we can face the face.

Educational and fun!  Here's the whole of "Face the Face," including the preamble that didn't get much radio play. 



* Not to be confused with Jorge Ramos Ávalos, the Univisión news anchor.

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On the other hand, we have They Might Be Giants, who've made whimsical songs about school subjects a habit.  I like their work, too, but "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" is still my favorite from them after all these years.  Something about "nobody's business but the Turks'" just appeals to my inner pedant.  Cheers!

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Friday Double: (9) Herman Cain's perpetual gift

I'm so happy about GOP presidential hopeful (and master crap marketer) Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax scheme.  It's made this Friday Double so much easier to compose than usual.  Thanks, Pizza Guy!

Leave aside the fact that even other Republicans hate 9-9-9; just note that it might have been stolen from a video game.  One of Cain's rivals, Michele "Corn Dog" Bachmann, even poked fun at his plan by insinuating a connection to the number 666, that well known symbol of the Antichrist.

Naturally, then, my first selection today comes from Omen III: The Final Conflict.  This 1981 mess was (fortunately) the last* of the Omen movies, which centered on one Damien Thorn, who is meant to be Antichrist.  This selection contains both the main title and a second track ("The Second Coming").  Combinations like this aren't uncommon in modern films, but Jerry Goldsmith made it a habit.


I could have picked the better known "Ave Satani" from the first Omen movie, which Goldsmith also penned.  Since Herman Cain is running for President, just like Damien Thorn did, this choice made better sense.

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The best thing about Cain's 9-9-9 scheme is that it's so easy to mock.  The folks over at Stephanie Miller's talk-radio show have taken to calling it "Nein! Nein! Nein!" and that inspired me to come up with another renaming:  "Plan 999 from Outer Space."

Oh, well.  I might as well just give you the theme to the classic Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).  I'm not sure who wrote it.  Wikipedia credits someone named Frank Worth, but IMDB claims that it's Emil Asher, who didn't get the credit.  Neither man sported a long film résumé.

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On the other hand, I could just follow the lead of these stupid birds from Finding Nemo (2003) and just call Cain's scheme the "Mine! Mine! Mine!" plan.


It's at least as stupid as those birds.

*There was a 2006 remake of the first Omen movie.  It was so forgettable, I forgot about it.

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Friday Double: (8) With thunderous applause

The Star Wars prequels are collectively so bad, I hesitate to call descriptions of any of their scenes "spoilers," but this post contains some.  It's worth the trouble to finally introduce John Williams, the best American orchestral composer of the late 20th Century, to my Friday Double feature.  He is to the prequels as the great Walter Payton was to the Chicago Bears 30 years ago:  it's not the former's fault that the latter sucked so hard.

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So this is how liberty dies:  with thunderous applause. -- Senator Amidala

The crowd reactions at the two latest Republican presidential debates brought this line to my mind.  It's rather terrifying to realize that large crowds of Americans are now openly cheering RIck Perry's love of the death penalty, or the thought of leaving the poor to die for simple lack of money.  People like that have always existed, but now they've lost even the decency to keep their vile sentiments to themselves.

So, yeah, Amidala's lament, probably the single most famous line from the three Star Wars prequels, has crossed my mind recently.  In Chapter III: Revenge of the Sith, Chancellor Palpatine, having just defeated an attempt by the Jedi to arrest him for treason, is using the incident as an excuse to appoint himself as Emperor.  The Senators cheer, prompting Amidala to complain to her few remaining allies.  Of course, the Emperor has neglected to tell his adoring Senate of his other recent creation -- Darth Vader, who, as the following track plays in the background, has just committed one heinous crime and is now working on a second.  [Amidala's line comes at about the 1:50 mark.]

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It isn't that there's anything inherently wrong with "thunderous applause."  A reaction like that is entirely appropriate, for example, after everybody's favorite benchwarmer ends a victorious game with, well, as much emphasis as possible.  The first couple of minutes of this Jerry Goldsmith joint make a lot more sense if you watch the actual final scene.  To skip that preamble, skip to about the 2:10 mark.


Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!

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Friday Double: (7) Kon'nichiwa (Part 1)

Fall, 1973:  My family had just moved 2000+ clicks north from Texas.  Since we were now in suburban Chicago, the TV now picked up eight -- count 'em, eight! -- channels, not just the three I got before.  Before the move, the nearest pro sports teams were Houston, three hours away by car, and Dallas (way too far!).  Now, there were five teams just an hour away.  The whole experience was a culture shock I was enjoying.  On top of all that, I had never seen anything like Speed Racer, something to which I became addicted.  Eventually, I outgrew that anime, but it's remained a keystone for me, a reminder of some very happy days.

Shouldn't that red car have about
400 endorsements plastered on its sides?

Yes, the storylines in Speed Racer suck, and so does the animation.  The animators, I suppose, can blame it on the 1960s, but it turned into a really bad movie just two years ago.  Nobuyoshi Koshibe's soundtrack music, happily, has held up much better over the decades.  It borrowed from the West Coast style of jazz that was popular then.  I'm still looking for one commonly used piece that would fit in beautifully in an NFL Films video, but my other favorite Koshibe track is the theme for "The Mammoth Car" (1967; still shown at right).  The episode is one of the most ridiculous of the entire series, and the Mammoth Car itself makes Aruba's World Cup dreams look downright credible.  Nevertheless, its theme carries a tone of menace worthy of a major villain from a series that's actually worthwhile.

Alas, I'm not allowed to embed this video, so you'll need to click on a link.   Go ahead; it's worth the effort.

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These days, it's Yoko Kanno who's been scoring some of the better Japanese anime out there.  Her best known pieces Stateside come from Cowboy Bebop, a program that's decent, but not as enjoyable as another anime she's scored, Ghost in the Shell.  On the other hand, I do like the music on Bebop better; in particular, it has a really snazzy theme.  Enjoy.

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Friday Double: (6) The intransigent black hole

First, a quick observation on media coverage of the debt-ceiling hostage situation:  the word "intransigent" describes a driver who crawls down the road at 20 mph below the speed limit and then refuses to let anyone else pass.  Technicaly, it's possible to use "intransigent" to describe the Osama bin Ladens, Agosto Pinchets and Anders Breviks of the world -- but that seems woefully inadequate, doesn't it?  Given their grim determination to shove the United States through an event horizon, House Republicans shouldn't be described as "intransigent," either.

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Event horizons, as suggested by the teabaggers, were my initial excuse for this week's Friday Double picks.  These are the parts of black holes from which neither matter nor light can escape.  My original plan for today was to just post a couple of pieces of music with black-hole motifs.

Leave it to U.S. Soccer hand me a new excuse to pile on top of the first.  Men's national team coach Bob Bradley, whose firing I had been hoping to see following last month's Gold Cup debacle, got the sack yesterday.  No word on whether Bradley chose paper or plastic.

Click to hear how I feel about this development.

This pretty overture is exactly that -- the overture to The Black Hole (1979).  For a barely watchable piece of unintentionally funny science fiction, it's an enormous part of Hollywood film history.

• It was the first movie Disney ever produced for an audience that didn't include younger children.  The movie succeeded well enough to eventually spawn the Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures studios, and, from there, the Disney empire we know and love.
• Its John Barry score was the first to ever be digitally recorded.
• After this and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, no mainstream Hollywood movie ever includes an overture.

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Jürgen Klinsmann (Wikipedia)

Back to U.S. Soccer.  Today, the federation named former German head coach Jürgen Klinsmann to succeed Bradley.  If the deal leaves Klinsmann the control over the men's program he wanted five years ago, this could be a good thing.  But his actual coaching resume is mixed.  He did take the Germans into the 2006 World Cup semifinals at home, and he did lead Bayern Munich deep into the UEFA Champions League.  But both terms were short, and Bayern didn't do so well in the Bundesliga under his reign.

As it turns out, the main title to John Barry's Black Hole score expresses my feelings about Klinsmann's hiring.  Bradley left the men's program in worse shape than many of my fellow U.S. soccer fans seem to think, so I'm only willing to give him a 2-in-3 chance of success.  If he fails, it won't be all his fault.

Either way, click and enjoy the main title.

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Friday Double: A little bit of this...

[Hey, it's still Friday in Pac-12 country.  That counts, doesn't it?]

One of the really neat things about HBO's best series is their collective attitude towards original music.  Some series, like Rome and Band of Brothers, have their own soundtracks.  Others, like The Wire and The Sopranos, use tracks only for the main and end titles; any music in between is purely incidental.

Deadwood fell somewhere in between.  It had an original opening title, and lush performances of 19th-century songs accompanied the credits.  What little soundtrack music producer David Milch saw fit to use was adapted -- and it was also very effective.  "Iguazu," a stunning 1998 guitar piece written and performed Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla, backgrounded some of the series' most tense and dramatic action scenes -- including a desperate pursuit of a runaway horse that turned the entire series.  Here, it serves as the basis for a simple music video featuring some pretty desert scenery.


This is one of my favorite pieces of adapted soundtrack music, but Santaolalla has since written soundtracks of his own, including Oscar-winning scores for Brokeback Mountain and Babel and a terrific score for The Motorcycle Diaries.  He's probably best known to casual moviegoers for "The Wings," the signature theme for Brokeback.  As it turns out, I dislike "The Wings" because it fits that movie almost too well.  Had it fit any better, it would have distracted from the movie instead of enhancing it.

That particular line has been crossed, and other great film composers have committed that turnover.  Not for the first time, I present Jerry Goldsmith; and once again, it's for work he did for the Star Trek franchise.  Here's  "The Cloud" from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).  As this music plays in the movie, the starship Enterprise is entering a vast, mysterious object that turns out to be much more than just a cloud.


The problem wasn't the music, which is gorgeous; nor was it the vast grandeur of this particular flight of the Enterprise.  Either one, taken alone, is mesmerizing.  It's the combination of the music and the visuals that caused me, and the movie, such grief.  The whole composition was so hypnotic, it put my oldest sister and at least one of her friends, with whom I saw it, to sleep -- and they were hardly alone.  Even though no one actually brought (let alone smoked) a joint into the movie room, I found myself nevertheless wondering where I could get some more of that bad-ass weed.

The moral, of course, is that soundtrack music can sometimes be too good.  Critical plot turns shouldn't become their own drinking games, but that's what Goldsmith accidentally accomplished here.

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Friday Double: The smell of her own ego

I've avoided discussing former half-term governors on this blog, simply because some of them get far more attention than they deserve.  I can understand why Illinois governor emeritus Rod Blagojevich hogs media attention; he's fortunate to have convinced TV networks to help with his massive legal bills.

That brunette atop this post, however, is another matter.  She's not just a teabagger, she's an outright Dominionist, someone who would have the United States transform into the neo-Crusader theocracy depicted in Julian Comstock.  It's only a remark she made in her attempt to hijack Rolling Thunder this weekend that prompted me to even mention her (or Blago):

I love that smell of the emissions.

Yes, I also loved the smell of those emissions, when they came from my grandfather's well appointed Glastron boat... forty years ago.  It was like sniffing glue.  By the time I turned seven, I realized that gasoline fumes weren't the best thing to be breathing.  Evidently, lady, you never picked up on that.  There are way too many of those gas fumes floating around, pumping out way too much carbon; and, like too many on your side of the aisle, you don't care about that any more than Lt. Col. Kilgore worried about napalm in Apocalypse Now.

On the plus side, the whole episode reminded me of a couple of songs that pretty well capture the most recently failed Vice-Presidential candidate.  When I first saw this hilarious bit of preening from  narcissistic Gaston, the villain in Beauty and the Beast, I knew that the whole movie would be a winner, unlike most of Disney's animated output from the 1990s.



If that described Caribou Barbie so perfectly, I wouldn't have needed this much darker piece from Little Jackie to also describe her.  It's not something I usually let anywhere my playlists -- the music is annoying enough without the lyrics -- but it fits too well today to resist.  Enjoy.

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Late Friday Double: Here, have some popcorn.

I'm not sure what to make of Harold Camping's prophecy marketing campaign for his impressively wealthy radio network has been deafening.  Given that natural disasters just don't respect time-zone boundaries, his forecast of worldwide earthquakes was ridiculous on its face.  If there must be a Rapture, I'd rather see it occur this way.

On the other hand, I did discover this version of "Popcorn" this morning.  Even though the Orquesta Cubana De Música Moderna covered Gershon Kingsley's famous instrumental way back in 1972, it's still a surer sign of the apocalypse than anything Family Radio could put out.


Here's the version that became an international hit, from Hot Butter.


My cat Scooter was watching the Sharks-Canucks game rather intently last night.  That's about as much rapture as I expect to witness this weekend.

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Friday Double: What's a nice theme like you...?

...doing in a rotten series like this?

My knowledge of Star Trek arcana may not be enough to make me a hard-core Trekkie, but I was dedicated enough almost a decade ago to actually look forward to the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise.  But my first hearing of the dreadful Faith of the Heart should have warned me about just how seriously the show would eventually suck.  The Diane Warren composition didn't even fit with the visual part of Enterprise's opening title, let alone the spirit of the Star Trek franchise.  I won't dignify that song with a link, because this Friday Double isn't about wastes of bad music on brutally disappointing television series.

It's about wastes of good music on brutally disappointing television series.

There are a few reasons why I don't hate Enterprise nearly as much as its predecessor, Star Trek:  Voyager.  First, Enterprise had better plots.  Second, it didn't have salamanders.  Third, I might have felt better about Enterprise had its opening title resembled the gorgeous treatment Voyager got.


To tell the truth, I had given up on Voyager well before it got to those salamanders.  It's just too bad Jerry Goldsmith's theme couldn't grace a show that deserved it.

Jeff Beal, whom I sometimes call HBO's resident composer, penned my other feature today.  Carnivàle had an opening title that framed it even more perfectly than Voyager -- but it sold a series that proved even more bitterly disappointing.

A blown Star Trek production like Voyager was inevitable, and so, too, was a bad HBO series.  Even at that, though, Carnivàle gave the HBO viewing world a shock.  Not even producer Ronald D. Moore liked it, as he would admit in a DVD comment track for his better known and liked series, Battlestar Galactica (2004).

So which other bad TV series got great opening credits?

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Friday Double: (1) Planet Earth

When I remarked on the passing of composer John Barry several weeks ago, I noted that I haven't brought up my love film or video soundtracks here often enough.  Hopefully, this new Friday Double feature will fix that.  The idea is simply to cite two cuts that I like every Friday, both from the same movie, TV series or composer.  The BBC/Discovery documentary Planet Earth stars in our premiere edition.

George Fenton has earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for the score to 1983 Best Picture Gandhi, but most of his work has been for British television.  Planet Earth won him his second Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition (after the equally stunning Blue Planet). While he could give the next quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood epic a proper score, Fenton is probably a lot happier doing what he does now.  Good on him.

I'll probably post more examples of Fenton's incredible range in the future, but here's "Surfing Dolphins."  In the film segment, the dolphins aren't just surfing near a small beach; they're teaching their kids how to track down dinner.  The NFL fan in me has also noted that, poorly as they've played recently, this same music could easily accompany the numerous miscues from the Miami Dolphins' last few seasons.



I wouldn't have brought gridiron up had I not heard the Planet Earth theme backgrounding an NFL Network report last fall.  That struck me oddly, because the NFL strongly prefers to commission its own incidental music, via NFL Films.  Yet, here they were, using the work of George Fenton (an outsider!) to help document the decline and fall of wide receiver Randy Moss.

Well, the NFL was using outside music, and it was the theme to Planet Earth... but George Fenton didn't write it.  The theme is a 51-second cut from "The Time Has Come," whose actual authors are Tobias Marberger and Gabriel Shadid.



There it is: my first Friday Double.   Hope you like it.

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