So HBO, in conjunction with Spitfire Audio, recently held a competition inviting composers to submit a score for a provided clip from Westworld season 3 (It’s from the fifth episode of the season, and is a scene involving a car chase and gun battle while Caleb is under the influence of a drug that causes him to experience the world in shifting film and TV genres.)
The winner was just announced, and there’s a bit of controversy. First, the winner has turned out to be . . . a professional film composer, having many credits and actually apparently having already done a project with JJ Abrams. I guess this was not against the rules, but some contestants have groused about it.
But more to the point, and what is more interesting to me, is the actual nature of the score the winner submitted. You can view and hear the clip with the winner’s score here. (If you want to skip the preamble, where they talk about the judges and criteria, the actual clip starts around 4:05. Also, I recommend you not read the comments until after you’ve seen the clip.)
If you don’t want to watch a video, here’s what happens:
The first part of it, with Caleb in noir genre, is scored with fairly typical action movie music: dramatic strings, pounding drums, that sort of thing. Then at around 4:40, as Caleb switches genres, the music switches to 8-bit Mario Brothers sounds and continues that way (with interpolations of more modern sounds) through the end of the scene.
In my opinion, it is either intentionally hilarious or unintentionally hilarious. As a bit of fun, I could see it going viral and being traded around for a laugh. But this would never have been greenlighted in a million years by the showrunners or producers if actually submitted for use.