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Mysterious Alternative Movie Soundtracks |
While this matchup of movie to album has become rather famous, despite Pink Floyd's vehement denials, very few people know about these other rather amazing matchups between albums and movies:
(start the CD at the very beginning of the movie)
1. The opening guitar instrumental of "Hotel California" almost matches perfectly with the opening credits.
2. The song starts "On a dark desert highway", the opening shot of the movie is a long pull back
along Sunset Blvd. which really is a dark desert highway.
3. The movie is narrarated in first person by a dead man whom we meet in the opening scene. The song lyrics
of "Hotel" also take a narrative form in first person, whose fate is never revealed, but we assume
is dead as well.
4. As the repo men storm out of William Holden's room, Don Henley sings, "You can check out any time
you like, but you can never leave".
5. "New Kid in Town" accompanies the scene where Holden meets the young screenwriter/secretary
Betty for the first time.
6. The movie's only car chase scene starts just as "Life in the Fast Lane" starts.
7. The song "Wasted Time" perfectly accompanies the wonderful first scene between Holden and Gloria Swanson,
it starts just as they meet over the dead monkey, and ends as he starts reading her screenplay. Not only does this
sad ballad perfectly set the tone for the scene, but the lyrics could easily be talking about Swansons's character
Norma Desmond.
8. The instrumental reprise of "Wasted Time" perfectly accompanies the narrarators silent
exposition of the situation. Just as Holden says the final line, "and I just may have a plan of my own",
the opening guitar riff of "Victim of Love" starts.
9. The first part of "Victim of Love" accompanies Holden's scheme to victimize Norma (con
some money out of her anyways.)
10. The last part of "Victim of Love" accompanies a scene between Holden and the butler "Max"
(Eric Von Stroheim) who up until now has not said more than a two word sentence. Later we learn that Max really
is a victim of love, throwing away a career as a director to be with Norma.
11. The soft sad musical intro to "Pretty Maids All in a Row" perfectly accompanies the funeral for the
monkey.
12. As Joe Walsh sings the title line to "Pretty Maids All in a Row" we see a lineup of framed
pictures of Gloria Swanson in her glory younger days.
13. The scene in the living room movie theater where Swanson makes a pass at the much younger Holden, is
accompanied by "Try and Love Again"
14. The Henley song "The Last Resort" a metaphor for the history of California, is about trouble times
in paradise as the world changes from old simple ways to new modern complexities. Many short transitional scenes
happen during this song: Holden loses his car to the repo men, they drive into town (just as the song talks about
a woman moving from Providence), Swanson buys Holden a tuxedo, rain falls and Holden is forced to move from the
guest quarters to the room next to Swanson, Max's revelation about Norma's suicide attempts (just as the song talks
about destruction of the land).
15. The long melancholy musical finale of The Last Resort plays over the strange melancholy "New
Years Party" scene.
16. Not only do the movie and the album share the same California setting, most of the themes of the movie and
the album are the same as well: the dark side of fame, lost opportunities for happiness, the path from self-deception
to self-destruction, and the thin line between success and failure.
(start the CD as the "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." comes on the screen.
1. The opening star field with the scrolling letters accompanies the lyrics "you look to the stars
for answers" and "a million tiny lightbulbs shining through celluloid across the country"
2. All the rebel guards stare at a door during the final chorus of "Who's There?"
3. The wild guitar riff opening of "Digging your Scene" plays just as the storm troopers break
through the doorway.
4. The mostly machine Darth Vader appears as the lyric "like I was some machine".
5. At the lyric "they say they think she's got a gun", Princess Leia appears holding a blaster.
6. The song "I Just Wanna See" begins just as C3PO and R2D2 leave in the escape pod for Tatooine.
The opening line in the song is "A planet on the go."
7. In the song "Waste", C3PO sees the transport on the lyric "all the time thats been stolen
when I was carrying you". When the line is repeated, R2D2 is sucked up into the transport.
8. As the transport rolls across the desert, the droids in the transport seem to move back and forth in synch with
first verse of the song "All Star".
9. Ironically, on the second verse, "Its a cool place and they say it gets colder," etc., the
storm troopers are scouring the desert in the heat.
10. On the final chorus of "Hey now, your an All-Star", we see Luke Skywalker for the first
time.
11. The primary line in the chorus to "Sattelite" is "Thats how I know that you are mine",
the song covers the span from when Luke purchases the droids to when he cleans them up, making them his own.
12. The song "Radio" about mass communication occurs as Luke finds the message from Leia
embedded in R2D2.
13. As Luke angrily tells his adaptive parents, that he wants to leave with his buddies and become a pilot,
we hear the opening lines to "Stoned" which go "Leave me alone, I'm over it,and everybody's
moving on. I can't see my tomorrow, and yesterday has come and gone, so leave me alone."
14. "Then the Morning Comes" starts the next day, just as the sand people attack. "You
are the few, the proud, you are the antibody, mind, soul, and Zen" is sung over the intro to Obi
Wan Kenobe.
15. "Road Man", a song about a strange roadie, also makes for a strange allegory to Obi Wan, since it
accompanies the scene at his home where he tells Luke about his father and The Force.
16. The the line from "Fallen Horses", "Now that I arrived here, I know I'm not alone. All
my friends among me tell me welcome home." We see a group of Tie-Fighters arriving at the Death Star.
17. The song "Defeat You" seems meant for Darth Vader who at the opening of this song is using The
Force to choke the officer. Especially telling is the opening line, "Born is a human with a Kung-Fu spine,
equipped with a detector of whats on your mind."
18. The lyric "Walking out the door, I'm on my way, can you tell me just where I'm going" and
the rest of the song "Come On Come On" accompany the journey and arrival of Luke and Obi Wan at
Los Isley Space Port.
19. The creepy song "Home" with its background tones remeniscent of old horror movies accompanies
the creepy saloon scene with all the creepy aliens.
20. The scenes with Han Solo is accompanied by "Cant Get Enough of You Baby" which makes no sense at
all.
21. The inside fold out of the CD shows the band at a space station being served drinks by a silver skinned
alien wearing a blue suit. Sort of a humanoid female version of R2D2 who served drinks in Return
of the Jedi.
(start the CD just as the opening title appears after the Universal logo)
1. As the band introduces Billy Shears, the gate keeper introduces the velociraptor to its cage.
2. On the first chorus of "I get by with a little help from my friends" Robert Muldoon grabs and
helps the
gate keeper.
3. On the second chorus, Gennaro trips and falls and is helped up by the amber miner.
4. On the third chorus, the miner is asking in Spanish for help with the light.
5. As Lennon sings about "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes", grant cleans the eye socket
of the velociraptor fossil.
6. On the line "Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes", Laura Dern makes her first appearance
wearing
sunglasses.
7. The paleontologist have to cover the fossil with canvas just as "fixing a hole where the
rain gets in" starts.
8. The helicopter trip to the island is accompanied by "she's leaving home"
9. The calliope music that sounds like you are entering the circus starts playing as the gates through
the perimeter fence are opened.
10. Side A of the album finishes exactly as the first dinosaur is seen.
11. Harrison sings "more within you and without you" as Mr. DNA appears out from within
Hammond's blood.
12. The cartoon dinosaur and fossil hunt is accompanied by "when I get older losing my hair,
many years from now"
13. On the line "filling out a ticket in her little white book" B.D. Wong is writing
something on a white clipboard.
14. The piano solo of "Lovely Rita" is in perfect synchronization with the hatching of the dino egg.
15. Ian Malcolm starts his "life will find a way" speech just as Lennon sings the line "Nothing
to do to save his life, call his wife in"
16. The chorus of "Good Morning, Good Morning" starts as the cow is lifted into the raptor cage.
17. The album cover Sgt. Pepper's features people standing in a park (jurassic?).
Of course none of this can be taken seriously, I am merely demonstrating absurdity by being absurd.
You can pick virtually any movie and virtually any album, and find at least a dozen strange coincidences, either with lyrics and dialog saying similar things, lyrics describing the action, synchronized music accompanying a scene, or asynchronous ironies. It should not be surprising that occasionally a movie and album matchup will have 40 or 50 such coincidences. Especially if you play the album two or three times through during the movie (all of the above were found just on the first go around of the CD's, many more would certainly be found on the second play through).
By the way, I did not try a lot of movie/album combinations so that the above represent the "best" coincidences. The above represent all the combinations I tried. I tried to go from the sublime to the rediculous. Hotel California and Sunset Boulevard really do have a lot in common, even more so than Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. On the other extreme Jurassic Park and Sgt. Pepper's have absolutely nothing in common thematically or stylistically, and yet strange commonalities appear anyways.
Try it yourself. Does "The Beasty Boys" go well with "The Lion King"? Will "Fight Club" have anything in common with Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club"? How about "Scream 2" and Brittany Spears' "Oops...I Did it Again"? Or, just compare Queen and The Marx Brothers with their respective versions of "A Night At The Opera". (I am kind of curious what Harpo is up to during Bohemian Rhapsody.)
Let this be a lesson to you out there in irony land. If you go out looking for miracles, coincidences, and conspiracies, you will find exactly what you are looking for. Just do not look too hard for any meaning or structure, you probably will not find any.