So these next two posts might be light on content, but heavy on the video.

YouTube is an amazing thing, and one of the most remarkable creations of the digital age.  More than anything else, it allows people to just marvel at the creative talent (or lack thereof) of…well…just about anyone.  From the Star Wars Kid to crazy/stupid drunk people doing crazy/stupid drunk things, the width and breadth of content on YouTube is sure to allow for hours of unending amusement.  We’ve all be sucked into a YouTube tornado, in which, like its cousin the Wikipedia Abyss, you start out looking for one thing and before you know it an hour has gone by and you wonder what the hell you have just wasted your time doing.  This just happened to me.

So what does this have to do with Film Music, or its child TV Music, or its young cousin Video Game music?  Well, I’m getting to that.  I stumbled onto this video earlier, a re-edited opening for Star Trek: Voyager set to the theme from Battlestar Galactica:

And in short order I had watched many other alternate openings to Voyager set to many different TV themes:

Stargate: Atlantis

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

Angel

and my personal favorite, Monk

For reference, here is the original opening and theme, with music by the one and only Jerry Goldsmith:

So what is the point of all this?  Besides the creativity of YouTube user Bloempje721, it is how a theme really does set the tone of the show.  All of the above examples, through the use of careful clip selection and video editing effects that closely mirror the originals, give us what would, in theory, be very different shows.  Yet the material, besides the theme, are all drawn from the same show!

Many people may not notice just how much music and a good theme song can set the mood of a show (though I sure none of my loyal blog readers are among those people), but if you doubt it, look no further than these videos.

p.s. – the Word Press spell-checker highlights ‘blog’ as not a real word