sountracking November 2009: TV theme song edition

Desperately disappointing, I know: We’ll have to do without Jordan Zivitz’s elegant musicological input on 11th ave. this month. I hope the instant fame of being 11th ave’s DJ has not gone to his head. If the next call I get is from some Mike Ovitz type with demands for “only-the-brown-M&Ms” and “Baby Duck and nothing else!”, well I might just have to call Nick Cave to talk some sense into our young genius.

However, soldiering on, we’ll try to jam a little music into this month’s mix with a few of TV theme songs. My all-time fave is actually a theme non-song — the eerie aural shimmer on Lost as the white-lettered title begins spinning on a black background, recalling the opening for the best TV series that ever was, Twilight Zone. The Lost opening, however, does not make for much of a video. Here are three worth trotting out.

1. Maggots are not for basic cable, but, when nestled in a rotting fox corpse, and bracketed by a slimy fly pupa, a river baptism and a rocking good-old-boy song, well that’s pay-cable magic.

2. I doff my cowl to Heath Ledger’s Joker and grind my teeth only a little now at Christian Bale’s ridiculously hissing Batman, but there is only one true Caped Crusader and that’s the 1960s TV cartoon. Ooooof! Zok! Ba-da-da-da-da…..

3. For the finale, I’m going with a theme song that has no words, but images that perfectly capture the pretty, happy slogans surrounding people falling, falling from the pedestal of 1950s “perfection” into the muddy, crazy-daddy mess of the 1960s.

Now remember, this is not a definitive list, but only a worm for your brain. Got your own faves? Leave a comment. (Want more ideas? Click here for IGN’s top 50 TV theme songs).

— Denise Duguay