April 27th, 2007
A Few Of Your Favorite Strings
I was quite impressed when, in a previous Ask The A.V. Club, you identified the origin of the stereotypical "Asian music" that often pops up in TV shows, etc. when an Asian character appears. In a similar vein, I have been puzzled by a campy bit of music that is constantly showing up in cartoons, especially in episodes of The Simpsons. It's a waltzing, bubbly little pizzicato piece that sounds like it would fit right into a cheesy old instructional film. It usually shows up in some sort of goofily self-aware montage. The most specific example of the theme's use I can think of is in The Simpsons' "Last Exit To Springfield" episode, where it plays over the montage of Burns and Smithers running the plant on their own. It is also in the episode "Marge Gets A Job." It plays over the sequence showing the destination of a nuclear plant message-tube. The theme also pops up in episodes of Ren & Stimpy, in episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, and dozens of other places where a cheesy bit of stock music is needed. Could you please tell me what this piece of musical fluff is and where it came from?
Kyle
Donna Bowman has found her niche tracking down obscure scraps of music:
Thanks for the challenge, Kyle. I bet we're all humming the piece in our heads right now—a bright, fast pizzicato (plucked violin strings) figure punctuated by a bubbly warble at the end of the phrase. It has a '50s space-age bachelor-pad-music feel, and it gets trotted out for all kinds of cheeseball montages and fake commercials.
The only problem is that the Simpsons examples you mention aren't that piece. They're designed to sound like that piece. The occasional pop song aside, Alf Clausen composes the soundtrack music for The Simpsons, and in these two cases, he's clearly evoking that bit of production music—but they have different melodies, as a quick check of the Simpsons DVDs reveals.
You mention the nuclear-plant message-tube sequence in "Marge Gets A Job." Is it possible there's another clue there? That scene is an homage to the pneumatic tubes running under the streets of Paris that Antoine Doinel uses to send a mash note to his girl in Stolen Kisses (directed by François Truffaut in 1968). But the music we're looking for isn't in the original film.
The Ren & Stimpy lead initially looks like a dead end, too. As numerous fan sites of the show attest, hundreds of music cues from the cartoon came from the Associated Production Music library, a repository of stock music often plumbed by time- and cash-strapped music editors. While several of the pizzicato tunes often listed as appearing in R&S resemble the famous one—notably "Pizzicato Playtime" and "Plucking the Strings"—they aren't identical.
But a chance encounter with bumper music on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition uncovered pay dirt. Thank Carl Castle Almighty for the crazy-complete rundown that npr.org posts for each show, including each snippet of incidental music. After hearing the pizzicato theme following a brief report on how many TV ads targeting children are for trash they shouldn't be eating (answer: 50 percent!), I went to the web and found it listed as "Happy Go Lively." It's available on Music For TV Dinners (get it? commercials, kids, junk food?), and the composer is Laurie Johnson, a (male) veteran of TV and movie music best known for his work on Dr. Strangelove.
APM also has an archival version of the tune in their library (on recording KPM 81). You can hear the whole thing (rather than the 30-second snippet on most sites that sell the TV Dinners CD) at their website, apmmusic.com, if you're willing to navigate a rather complex Flash interface to find it. No doubt it wormed into the public consciousness in the first place through that library, by being purchased and used in various cartoons, commercials, and TV shows—and then by being parodied and pastiched in self-consciously retro evocations of the original. And now it's back in your head, Kyle. We hope you're inclined to thank us, rather than to hunt us down and kill us.
Rain Rain Go Away
Kevin Palka's question of 13 April got my memory churning. I vaguely remember watching a movie (reel-to-reel, of course)—this would be in the early '80s, when I was 7 or so—about a group of children who lived on Venus. The story took place at their school. Apparently, it rained every day on Venus except for one day of the year, when the sun finally came out and they could go outside and play. Children looked forward to this day more than anything else in their lives. I remember that one of the girls, for some reason, was locked into a cupboard on that day, and so missed out on all the fun. That's all I remember, and some days when I think about it I wonder if I'm making it up. But I'm pretty sure I'm not. Any ideas what it might be?
Ed Hoover
When I was young, my dad would play weird videos for me. Notably Pink Floyd's The Wall, which scared the crap out of me. During those times, I also watched a short film, maybe it was a music video, where there were children who could not go outside. It was always raining and gray, and the kids dressed alike. A main character in the story is a little girl who is always bullied. At some point she is locked in a closet. The story ends with the sun coming out and all the other children going outside to play in the sunshine for a very short amount of time. Is this associated with Pink Floyd in some way, and I'm just overlooking it, or was it just something my dad decided to tape?
Alison
I clearly remember this movie from when I was a kid. It took place on another planet or maybe in the future. I remember that it rained all the time, and the movie mostly took place in a school. The only plot points I really remember is that the kids are playing around and lock one of the kids in a closet or something. This happens to be the one day a year/decade/something where it stops raining and the sun comes out. Any idea what I'm talking about? This has been bugging me for years.
Paul
Tasha Robinson says "All right, already!":
Most of you are unique in the strange, half-forgotten things you want identified, but this (like the Ghostbusters question from a few weeks back) is one of the few questions we get over and over from different people in different forms, all clinging to the same few details: The girl, the rain, the closet. I actually got another e-mail asking this question again as I was compiling the column you're reading right now. So without further ado:
You're all thinking of the 1982 short-film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1959 short story "All Summer In A Day." The story takes place on Venus in an unspecified future time, in a classroom full of 9-year-olds, "the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives." On Venus, it rains heavily and nonstop, except for a sunny break that comes around for a single hour, once every seven years. The children are, of course, too young to remember the last time it happened—except for Margot, a fragile girl whose parents immigrated from Earth, and who gets bullied by the other kids in large part because they're jealous of someone who's actually seen the sun.
As everyone who asks this question remembers, just before the hour without rain comes around, the other children grab Margot and bundle her into a closet, in a fit of childish resentment, though they're more teasing her than deliberately denying her the sun, which they only half-believe in anyway. Then when the sun actually comes out, they're so excited that they forget about her until the rain starts again. The short story ends with them guiltily remembering her, and trudging back inside to let her out. The film version has a longer coda, in which she emerges from the closet, and each of the children hands her the flowers they've picked, by way of apology. About the only person of any note involved with the film version was Edith Fields, who played the kids' teacher; look closely, and you can find her in a single episode of just about everything on TV, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Murphy Brown to Seinfeld to NYPD Blue to The Facts Of Life to Six Feet Under. Unfortunately, you aren't likely to find her in this; it's never been available on video or DVD. But you can find the story in Bradbury's anthology A Medicine For Melancholy.
And no, it doesn't have anything to do with Pink Floyd. More's the pity.
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