Welcome to Cartoon Conspiracies
where I attempt to unearth some questions and secrets about animation
history that have not necessarily been brought to the surface.
If
you're about my age, you were probably around when the early Pokemon
films hit America, and you most likely remember what a big deal that
was. Although it was released in Japan a year before, Pokemon
the Movie 2000 (or The
Power of One) hit our shores
just in time to coincide with the Orange Islands saga on the anime
and the release of Pokemon Gold and Silver. The critics hated it, but
kids still ate it up.
In the movie,
there's a track called “Lugia's Song,” which is played throughout
the film and ties into the central story. Like many other elements,
this song went through a complete re-write when it was adapted for
the Americans. Here is the original version that played in the
Japanese release:
The version we got
sounded a bit different. The instrumental was adapted to the fit
lyrics for a song on the film's soundtrack that was performed by
Donna Summer. Most infamously, the lyrics to that track were even
quoted by republican presidential candidate Herman Cain in his
farewell speech....in 2012!!! Over a decade after the film's release!
Listen to the US release below:
There's a
little-known fact about this piece that has rarely been brought up:
it sounds exactly like that of the main theme from a different
soundtrack! I'm not joking. The theme you just listened to is a lie.
In
case you've never heard of it, there was a little horror film in 1981
called The Burning. I
highly recommend watching it. It takes the summer camp trope made
famous by Friday the 13th
and treats it seriously. As a viewer, you don't want these characters
(including one played by a young Jason Alexander) to die. Plus, the
killer is named Cropsy, straight out of the urban legends of New York
and New Jersey.
Anyway, I'm
getting ahead of myself. One of the best aspects of The Burning is
its soundtrack, performed by one of my favorite artists, Rick
Wakeman, the keyboardist for Yes. Here's his main score for the film:
Did
you hear it? The similarities are staggering. There is no doubt that
this is the same piece of music that played two decades after the
release of The Burning.
(If you really want to go further down the rabbit hole, at the 9:29
mark in the video, several chords resemble a later song by Wakeman
called “The Hangman” which was part of Wakeman's score to Lon
Chaney's Phantom of the Opera.)
So what happened
here? There's several possibilities. First, when 4Kids dubbed the
Pokemon film, they changed the musical selection entirely. My guess
is that replacing the soundtrack entirely made the dubbing process
easier. It's possible that someone was commissioned to write new
music but not sound too much like the original Japanese track, so
some slight tweaks gave way to this new version of “Lugia's
Song.”If this is the case, then all of this could be a complete
coincidence. This Americanized track does sound kind of like the one
on the Japanese soundtrack if you suspend your disbelief enough.
But what if that's
not what happened? What if the composer was a fan of movie scores,
and when drawing from inspiration, their senses were overwhelmed by
the bombastic brass tones of Wakeman's keyboards? What if they knew
that the main theme from an obscure 80's horror film, which never had
an official home video release at that point, would be ripe for
ripping off, and no viewer, especially no viewer of a children's
anime movie, would be the wiser? It's a long shot to make this claim,
but it's worth thinking about.
To
date, I have only seen this conspiracy addressed once by the two guys
in this video. With its inclusion of a narration paying tribute to
the original trailer of The Burning,
this one is worth a quick watch:
Sadly, I still
have no answers to this mystery. How did two scores from two very
different movies end up sounding alike? If you know the answer,
please tell me in the comments below, and join me here next time to
discuss another conspiracy in the history of animation.
The
top photo is of my copy of the movie. I stole the other one from
Google Images. Sorry.
