This got me to thinking: Why do some sci-fi enterprises get the music of the future so right, and why do some get it so very wrong? And why do we sometimes latch onto the very worst of them, getting earworms even more pervasive then what happened to Chekov in The Wrath of Khan. Here’s exploring some of the best (and worst) space jams from the farthest reaches of the galaxy (and the dark recesses of YouTube).
How far back can we go? Joseph Haydn’s “Il Mondo della Luna” is a 1777 opera featuring a man tricked into believing he lives on the moon, the film Le Voyage Dans La Lune/A Trip to the Moon didn’t have an official musical score originally, but the film was likely accompanied by live music and in-house sound effects, and the score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet is suitably far out.
Probably the best worst place to start chronologically is the 1962 “A Date with Jet Screamer” episode of The Jetsons. The plot is among the most convoluted ever drawn on celluloid, but it ends with the rocket-hot tune “Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-ah! (Means I Love You)” performed by Jet Screamer styled as a sexless Elvis who somehow has time traveled Wayne Newton’s hair onto his head. The backing aliens are adorable, and I’ve been fruitlessly searching for that exact yellow interstellar guitar at thrift shops for decades.
Further out in the galaxy lies this 1969 episode of Star Trek called “The Way to Eden.” In this scene, Charles Napier(!), the stern face seen in Silence of the Lambs, The Blues Brothers, Rambo, Austin Powers, and hundreds of other roles channels his inner hootenanny and serenades the crew of the Enterprise with a dorky hippie-lite space folk song. Highlights include backing go-go vocalist Deborah Downey doing a solid Mary Travers impression, a stoned redshirt playing the air drums, and Mr. Spock dejectedly deciding not to play his galactic lute at the open mic night after all.
Andor was by no means the first Star Wars music cue to invade the pop culture airwaves. The megablockbuster took over everything from breakfast cereals to The Donny and Marie Show, but the horrific collision of John Williams’ theme and the already-imploding disco mainstream was inevitable, and nobody did it bigger than producer and apparent visionary Meco. His booty-bumping “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” was the unabashed highlight of the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, and the track eventually hit #1 in October 1977.
Not to be outdone, the rebooted Gil Gerard vehicle Buck Rogers opened a few buttons on their metallic leisure suits for a 1979 space disco scene featuring the bloopingly groovy Stu Phillips tune “Jelly Belly.” The actually show inspired some pretty great early electronic dance music, but the real artistic ground being broken was in Buck’s ability to get down and boogie.
Somehow, the futuristic sci-fi performances in movies in the ’80s mostly sounded like synth music of the ’80s, so we’re now jumping lightspeed ahead to 1997 to where Korben Dallas got his hardened heart melted by a blue-skinned actress miming Inva Mula‘s opera-meets-tech-house with some un-singable histrionics. The second half of the performed piece was composed by Eric Serra with some intentionally impossible vocal requirements, and tweaked in the editing to sound more otherworldly. Then, Bruce Willis needs to reach inside her and pull out some square rocks. It makes sense in the film.
Hoo boy. I really debated on this one but I think if we’re going to show Buck Rogers shaking his butt with a silver robot, we gotta get into the Zion Dance from The Matrix Reloaded. The saving grace is that the tune is actually a jam. U.K.-based act Fluke know what they’re doing, performing a slinky and skittering tribal-sounding house track that stands fine on it’s own. The video linked below is probably the least-cringy edit of the scene. If you really want to revisit the gross sweaty slo-mo humping of the original film, you can wetworks it into your eyeballs here.
To round out our list and cleanse the palate, here’s something that gets it exactly right. When we learned that electrobots Daft Punk were composing the score to the 2010 reboot of the digitized and de-rezzed sequal to Tron, the universe finally made sense. The film score stands on its own, and it was simply inspired to have the actual performers orchestrate the soundtrack of the fight in the neon nightclub where they hold court. The cool thing is, they probably didn’t even have to visit the costuming department. They may have just shown up like this.
By no means is this the exhaustive list of good and so-bad-its-good sci-fi funky performances and space jams, so let us know what we forgot. And remember, as one of the great minds of our time boldly proclaimed: “Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-ah!”
