Movie Musical Theme Mixup

Cafe Society
1

Me and a certain anonymous younger sibling (he asked me not to mention him, so I’m not naming names :D) was discussing Star Wars the other day and he mentioned that the guy who composed all (or at least most) of SW’s theme music also wrote for Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. He then went on to wonder what happened if, by some fluke, somebody had accidentally gotten the scores mixed up before the movies were released so that, say, the opening text crawl of A New Hope was accompanied by Indiana Jones’ title theme. (Yes, yes, chronologically impossible, but for the sake of a hypothetical situation let’s make believe this happened.)

I argued that it would have sounded weird, because Indiana Jones’ theme is more “wildcap adventure”, whereas Star Wars is more “epic space fantasy”. He countered that it was becuase I’ve already associated the music to their respective movies so deeply that my opinions are biased.

So what do y’all think? And, expanding on this theme, could you imagine the signature themes of one movie switched with that of another’s?

2

I don’t think the feel of the two themes is off enough that it would’ve felt wrong way back when to switch them. But now–no, it wouldn’t work.

3

I think most of John Williams’s movie themes could be interchanged, and a person who had not seen the movie wouldn’t find anything to be amiss. Those of us who have built a strong association between a certain piece of music and a movie would find it jarring, though.

4

John Williams, prolific composer he is, also composed the themes that accompany the logos of two movie studios: Universal and Dreamworks. Switching them would make an interesting change. Dreamworks’s slow, almost Southern-sounding theme would be an unusual choice for a zoom-out onto the Earth, but it would fit. However, the bombastic Universal theme would be wholly inappropriate accompanying a small boy fishing on the moon.