A lot of us know that the Bonanza theme actually has lyrics, which there’s footage of the actors actually singing (although I don’t think that they ever did on the show proper)
And I learned that **star Trek**'s theme actually has lyrics (I think I first read this in the book *The Making of Star Trek*)
And Bill Murray on SNL played a lounge singer singing “Star Wars”
But what I’m referring to here are other, less obvious cases where you can fit the movie title into the lyrics, and it was probably intended that way.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World – This one is actually kind of obvious if yyou see the opening credits, because a little animated figure pops out of the “world” and starts to “sing” the title. In my defense, I’d only heard the theme music for a long time, and it wasn’t until well after the film came out that I finally saw the opening. If nothing else, I can use the film music as a handy mnemonic for how many times the word “Mad” appears in the title. Saul Bass did the title animation
**Around the World in Eighty Days** -- animation in the extensive closing titles also by Saul Bass, but it's blocked by Warner Brothers so you can't watch it. Again, the theme music by Victor Yound has a significant cadence that "around the world in eighty days" perfectly fits into.
The lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless” were written by director Robert Altman’s 14 year old son Mike. He’s made far more money in royalties from the movie than his father.
On an appearance on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…, Dick van Dyke revealed - and sang - the lyrics to the Dick Van Dyke Show theme tune, written by Morrie Amsterdam. It was neat, but the title of the show was not included.
In a lot of those cases the lyrics were written after the fact, sometimes long after, like Manilow’s lyrics to Bandstand Boogie. That is, the words were written after the song had been presented as an instrumental. There’s a video of Carol O’Connor singing the ending song to All in the Family, and he explains that he didn’t even notice the music until a few episodes had been aired, then he asked the composer for permission to write lyrics. So it could be argued that the lyrics aren’t really “official” in those cases.
the way Disney took Tchaikovsky’s Grande valse villageoise from his balletSleeping Beauty and turned it into “Once Upon a Dream”?
Or the way we turned Treulich geführt from Wagner’s Lohengrin into “Here Comes the Bride” * (“Bridal Chorus,” the other common title, doesn’t fit the music)?
*According to Dave Barry, you can’t help but sing the next line as "Big, Fat, and Wide>
It’s probably worth pointing out that the Looney Tunes music has a title and lyrics – The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. Daffy Duck actually sings it in an early cartoon. It was used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, too (Judge Doom even reads the title off a record).
An earlier thread that’s not perfectly coincident with this one, but covers much the same ground, mentioning lots of other TV show themes that had unexpected lyrics