How many tunes can we identify that have been used as background music for jugglers and magicians and circus acts?
Here are a couple to get us started:
The big one is “The Entry of the Gladiators” by Fucik.
Flight of the Bumblebee, used in a favorite movie scene.
Some helpful pages:
Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite (1913) - Karl L. King
ART METRANO IS WONDERFUL << What’s this tune? >>
Over The Waves by Juventino Rosas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrFhfPYPUl4
I finally had the idea to check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Metrano where we see
which leads to:
fine and dandy and George Wallington Trio - FINE AND DANDY
Finally, after 68 years and 11 months I know the name of this damn tune!
A lot of jugglers in the 80’s and 90’s used Root Beer Rag, by Billy Joel.
Not traditional circus music, to be sure. But it was peppy, had a lot of emphasis points a juggler could time his moves to, and was exactly three minutes long, which was good for show planning.
Nice! It made me think of other specialized music used for juggling and I ran across this that suggests The Peter Gunn Theme might be a good candidate: Ruslan Dmytruk Juggler " MASK "
Of course, I was actually hunting for Juggling to Beatles Music
I have whole CDs full of circus music, so I’m a ringer.
Thunder and Lightning is the traditional music for the acrobats.
Valse Bleu is the trapeze acts’ tune.
YES!!! I’ve been wondering about this tune for decades, and yesterday reading your thread decided I was going to whistle the damn thing into an MP3 and post it into a new thread begging for help. But you found it! A BIG thank you for posting that!!
You’re so welcome! I’m glad it was bugging more than just me and that I could provide a service to any and all. 
It would be great if we could have a thread that was devoted to helping people get the names for tunes they can whistle or hum but have no good clue to the name of the piece.
I’ve had poor luck with such websites that attempt that. Their libraries seem to be too limited for my tastes.
Rather than starting a new thread with a link to this one, I decided to risk a bump to the one with the links to YouTube.
Do these sound familiar to you? If so, can you point to others in the same general vein?
Mambo Jambo (Que Rico El Mambo)
Thanks for “Mambo Jambo”. That’s the music Laura Petrie dances to in “To Tell Or Not To Tell”, after which Mel has the idea of her temporarily replacing a missing dancer on the Alan Brady Show. I’m adding it to the IMDb entry.
It sounds like you may have watched that PBS “America in Primetime.” That’s where I heard the tune and was 80% sure I knew its name, so I went to YouTube to see if I had the right name.
That triggered the memory of this thread and made me wonder if others had similar uncertainties of similar song names. Thanks for the reply.
For similar songs, well, you’ve already linked three of Pérez Prado’s (Qué rico el mambo is his), but he was known as the King of Mambo and wrote tons of them; the wiki article lists a selection at the bottom. Lou Bega’s cover of his Mambo Number 5 was a big hit c. 1999; you may want to check out the rest of Bega’s work for starters while I go hide from any purists.
Ravel’s Bolero is a common one for magicians, especially those doing an “Arabian nights” themed act. In fact, growing up I saw this so often I thought it was a Middle Eastern tune.
In Japan, a common piece used by magicians onstage or on television for BGM is Paul Mauriat’s “El Bimbo” (AKA, The Blue Oyster Bar’s tango song in the “Police Academy” films).
that magic show hosted by bill bixby: the slow acts liked swan lake and moonlight sonata while the fast ones liked ad jingles and folk music.