Watching a good crime show can be a rich aural experience. Hard soled shoes striding around street corners, heavy weapons slamming on wooden desks, even the scratch of a pencil in a private dick’s notebook stir something deep inside the viewer. It’s the small sound details that make the gritty streets palpable but it's the theme song that makes us want to jump into the patrol car and go clean up those streets.
Bombastic, rousing, and magnificent. The greatest crime theme songs employ a full horn section for the same reason a bugle wakes soldiers up in the morning; the songs are there to gear you into action! Sure, you might just be sitting on the lounge eating banana custard in your tracksuit bottoms but a good crime show will test your wits and mental reflexes. This is your case and I’m not about to go down for your sloppy police work, you hear me?
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10. The Inspector Gadget theme
OK, so it’s a cute kids cartoon BUT have a listen to this:
And then listen to this in all its glory:
The Inspector Gadget theme draws heavily on Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. In Grieg’s original score to Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt, the song is played when Peer Gynt enters the giant, ominous hall filled with trolls and goblins who want to devour and destroy him. Ibsen’s lyrics are as follows:
Slay him!
Slay him!
May I hack him on the fingers?
May I tug him by the hair?
Hu, hey, let me bite him in the haunches!
Shall he be boiled into broth and bree to me
Shall he roast on a spit or be browned in a stewpan?
Ice to your blood, friends!
So, you may think you’re watching an animated sitcom about a bumbling cyborg who relies on the smarts of a child and a dog but sonically the creators of the show are trying to prepare you for an episode of epic terror.
Grieg is quoted as saying that he didn’t much like In the Hall of the Mountain King, saying that it “reeks of cowpats and ultra-Norwegianism”. Perhaps The Inspector Gadget theme was more what he originally had in mind.
9. Overkill – The Bill theme
To this day this theme makes me feel incredibly uneasy. When I was a kid and I heard this it would mean I was in for seeing some scary things- usually someone who had an alcohol problem! My parents loved it and would bounce up and down on the couch calling me “Guv” and barking “Sierra Oscar CHHHH” into imaginary radios.
The jazzy theme was replaced by this lacklustre version in 2009:
In 2010 the show was cancelled. The demise of the 26-year-running show has not been attributed directly to the new theme but I think we can all join the dots.
8. The Peter Gunn theme
Listening to the driving baseline and blaring horns of the Peter Gunn theme it’s impossible not to imagine Jake and Elwood Blues rolling through Chicago in their beat-up police car but the theme was originally written for a crime show called, strangely enough, Peter Gunn.
The theme is most notable for its composer, Henry Mancini, who is famous for having written every single other song in movie history EVER. Mancini also wrote Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the theme for Days of Wine and Roses, The theme from Charade, The famous theme from Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet, the theme from Love Story, the sax-ually exciting Pink Panther theme and THE GODDAMNED BABY ELEPHANT WALK, and that’s just a small sample.
The Peter Gunn theme won Mancini an Emmy and two Grammy’s and went on become a jazz-rock standard to be played by big bands at RSLs everywhere.
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