The Lark Representative at 30 seconds into that commercial is Barney Phillips, the guy most of us would know as the “Three-eyed Venusian” in the classic TZ episode “Will the Real Martian Please Stand up”.
I’m just old enough to remember the Marlboro theme song but not quite old enough to watch The Magnificent Seven when it premiered.
Very few people know what the song Solfeggio is. A few people might remember it as the Song of the Nairobi Trio from The Ernie Kovacs Show, most people remember it from the Colt 45 commercial.
I don’t know if John Sebastien’s “Welcome Back” was repurposed, but the theme song to “Welcome Back Kotter” actually reached number one for a week.
Weird.
Monty Norman’s song Good Sign Bad Signwas re-purposed as the James Bond theme. Or at least the dum-diddy-dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-diddy-dum part.
He was also Doc Kaiser on 12 O’Clock High.
Laurie Johnson’s “The Shake” became the theme for The Avengers.
“Ride of the Valkyries” isn’t exactly a theme song, but it sure got extra mileage from Apocalypse Now.
The Mission Impossible theme song–after the TV show but just before the movies–made for a catchy jingle for some brand of salsa back around 1990.
There was an album in the late 90s called Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, where then-hot musicians covered the theme songs of bygone cartoon favorites. The Ramones’ “Spider-Man” was included, but was already kind of a hit from one of their earlier albums. Other great inclusions by Liz Phair, Frente and the Butthole Surfers.
“Procession of the Nobles” by Rimsky-Korsakov was the theme song for Agronsky and Company (the news talk show that became The McLaughlin Group after Martin Agronsky died). I grew up in the DC area and the show might have been a bigger deal there than nationally. I can’t find much about the clip online, but recall it was performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Aram Khachaturian’s “Adagio from Spartacus” became the theme for the BBC series The Onedin Line.
Not sure if you’d call it a “theme” in its original form, but a tune from Leonard Bernstein’s musical Candide became the theme to Dick Cavett’s 1970s TV talk show.
“Welcome Back” was written for the show - in fact, they changed the name of the show from “Kotter” to “Welcome Back, Kotter” because the theme turned out to be so catchy. Welcome Back (John Sebastian song) - Wikipedia
Didn’t Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer get a push when it was used in The Sting?
It did, but it was not written as the theme song to anything.
For years I only knew “Pomp and Circumstance” and Randy “Macho Man” Savage’s theme song.
This one’s a little more obscure. When I was a kid, the local ABC 10 o’clock newscast in Chicago used an instrumental opening theme.
Years later, the first time I saw Cool Hand Luke, I was surprised to hear the Channel 7 News thene as background music! (I’m pretty sure the movie came first.)
Actually, the tune predates either of them. It’s a library piece called The Awakening by Johnny Pearson. Excerpt starts at 3:29. I imagine it was used in several films.
News At Ten started using it in 1967, Five Bloody Graves was made in 1969.
Wiki on News at Ten theme.
This is one of my favorite CDs of all time. They weren’t Top 40 hot. Much more punk and college.
“To Anacreon in Heaven” was the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians in London. The tune became a bit more famous when it was re-purposed to support the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” So, yeah, our national anthem is a filk song.