I know the only reason this hasn’t been mentioned is that it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be mentioned.
“All Star” by Smashmouth.
It’s in the movie you mentioned but I think Ferris Beuller’s Day Off made it famous.
Not even in Trainspotting?
Let me add
Boom - P.O.D.
Well holy freakin shit!! You MUST be X-TREME to the MAX!!!
Well, in certain incarnations, yes…
Mr. Blue Sky by ELO. Good song but way overused.
Oh, right. OK, that would be the one instance so far.
I had no idea what this was, so I looked for it on Youtube.
The video is hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-1Ga_ZBhnc
Looks like P.O.D agrees with you.
The United Airlines jingle, by some jingle writer named George Gershwin.
Good grief - Erik Satie’s frigging Gymnopédie No. 1.
How are we twenty posts into this and no one’s mentioned Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day? Beautiful, heartbreakingly bittersweet song about all good things coming to an end (with bonus lovely violin solo) and I WILL KILL SOMEONE if it’s on one more final episode, montage, or retrospective.
Does anyone else think it’s ironic that this song is Green Day’s most widely known song? Everyone has heard this song, on TV or at their ten-year-old’s elementary school graduation, and even people who can’t stand Green Day can recognize it, if not place it? I think Green Day will be remembered, in the long run, for this song, which is completely at odds with everything else they do.
Oh, and don’t get me started on how Sing, Sing, Sing is now the “Chips Ahoy” song or, god forbid, the William Tell Overture is now the Lone Ranger theme. At least the thief has good taste.
Most things by Randy Edelman. If I hear the bit from Dragonheart used in one more film trailer I’m building a time machine to stop him from ever writing that score.
There was a song, “Viens, Mallika, les liens en fleurs” from a French opera which nobobdy ever staged because its story was too similar to Madama Butterfly, so it wasn’t spoiled by overplaying until about twenty years ago. “Nessun Dorma” had that same fate.
It reminds me of Benny Hill. They played it as background music whenever there was a sketch set in a park.
“Bodies” by nu-metal schlock purveyors Drowning Pool, used in countless action movie trailers and wrestling promos. It sucked then, and it still sucks.
The problem is that they’re often actually playing Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby for any movie that has some kind of wintery motif in it. So it has double the likelihood of making an appearance.
There was a good ten year stretch where the trailer for any horror movie would play a piece from the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Among other things, it just seems wrong to use another movie’s music to hype your own.
Commercially available music I have no problem with. However, there are some stock music cues that are rather overused that annoy me whenever I hear them in advertising. One is a piece titled Bartmania which is meant to mimic The Simpsons theme which is often used in advertising for children to create a mood of insanity. (I was surprised when this was actually used in an ad for a licensed Simpsons product, the Homer Simpson Operation game). The other, which I haven’t been able to find the title of, is meant to mimic the theme to Leave It To Beaver and is always used in advertising in an ironic fashion, as if to say, “This ain’t Leave it to Beaver.” It was used in this fashion in ads for The War At Home. The only occasion I’ve heard it in which it was used for a “cheesy 1950s tripe” mood (but still in an ironic fashion) was the DVD menu for Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mr. B’s Lost Shorts.
They even use it for the new Rambo trailer. As if Rambo doesn’t already have his own awesome theme music.
On the other end of the spectrem, it sounds like directors liked the use of Sia’s Breath Me in the finale of Six Feet Under so much that it has become the “heartwrenching episode/movie” song. You know, for when Coldplay or The Fray aren’t schmaltzy enough.
“The Final Countdown” is also for Detroit Pistons player introductions . Note the date. They stopped using the song for a while until Joe Dumars became the guy in charge in the front office. The first thing he did was to bring it back.
(A newer introduction with the best announcer in the game today. It’s after the Kid Rock song, by the way.) (Newer yet).
That’s Solsbury Hill (near Bath), not Salisbury, which is in Wiltshire and has no hills because it’s on a plain.
“Ode to Joy”. It’s used in commercials, tv shows, movies, movie trailers. When I saw it used for the last Die Hard movie, I lost it. Just because you can use it for free doesn’t mean you should. It’s never used in the intended context, it’s often used during heavy duty action scenes. I’m pretty sure Beethoven wasn’t picturing Bruce Willis dodging exploding semi-trucks and helicopters.
I guess it doesn’t help that I use it for my telephone ringtone.