Turning on the TV and flipping through the dial, or rifling through any well-stocked DVD collection, it’s obvious that different eras have different looks we associate with them. We think of the 1930s and ‘40s as being in black and white, the lush Technicolor of ‘50s widescreen epics, the split-screen effects of late 1960s movies, today’s digital CGI effects, and so on. But certain eras have unique sounds as well. And tracking these down can be rather elusive.

Back in 2007, Jersey City’s WFMU radio station, on its popular “Beware of the Blog” er, blog, had a great podcast and accompanying blog post on “The Music Everybody Loves! Everybody Wants! Nobody Has!” It’s a sort Raiders of the Lost Music Cues from the 1960s, beginning with the cheesy but beloved 1967 Spider-Man cartoon series. Everybody knows the theme song (“Is he strong? Listen bud, He’s got radioactive blood!”), but it’s the music within the episodes themselves that we’ve all heard, but because of copyright issues have become somewhat lost over time:

When I first posted this article in early 2007, the reason did not start and stop with a simple celebration of this music. I actually wanted to track it down. After the initial post, I heard loud and clear from all facets of nerds, many of them angry (you’d be mad too if you went decades without getting laid). The music from the second and third season came almost exclusively from a music library in England. It might all be a blur for the average reader or fan – what music came from what season? I’ve taken the liberty of putting together an hour podcast that pitts, side by side, the original muddy sounding soundtrack from the show, to the pristine original master tapes of the corresponding song, beautifully preserved, from the KPM library. Listen to it here.

The KPM music library is the oldest and largest music library in Britain – maybe even the world. They still exist today, and for a fee, you too could use the original Spider-man music in a film or TV show. This link is essential and gives you everything you need to know about KPM. Also, a special thanks to this enormous group of nerds who have added insight, information, links and corrections – their message board is well worth checking out. Many people have searched for this music throughout the years, and although they remain anonymous (but super nerdy), their work and persistance paid off. Just finding KPM alone is not enough. The KPM library consists of thousands and thousands of reels, tapes, and LPs and as mentioned before, none of these are labeled “the music from Spider-man.”  They had to be scoured individually before the correct beds were unearthed. The majority of the songs in the second and third seasons were composed by these British songsmiths: Syd Dale, Alan Hawkshaw, Johnny Hawksworth, David Lindup, Bill Martin and Phil Coulter.

In the late 1960s, these music cues were everywhere. At NFL Films, in-between the scores they commissioned from composer Sam Spence, John Facenda’s Voice of God was frequently accompanied by cues from KPM in in numerous late-‘60s highlight reels. (Listen to the cues at 2:00 minutes and 53:00 into the above-linked podcast. If you’ve watched old NFL Super Bowl highlight reels on ESPN or the NFL channel, you know you’ve heard these. And they even made it to England — these cues appeared in several Monty Python episodes. I’m pretty sure that the thermonuclear musical sting that accompanies the Spanish Inquisition — unexpectedly! — whenever they burst into the room was taken from the tail-end of one of these recordings. (listen at about 43:45 in the KMFU podcast.) And speaking of Python’s religious parodies…It’s The Bishop!

Roger L. Simon recently did a post on “The Death of the Cool,” but as far as jazz itself, listening to WMFU’s podcast on KPM, you can really hear the very end of postwar cool. Take a listen to the cue at 38:00 minutes into their podcast, and it’s last round-up for the sorts of swank arrangements Gil Evans was writing for Miles in the 1950s.

Categories: DIY Video, Movies, Pop Culture of the Past