Superhero TV Cartoon Theme Songs
I think my favourite and least favourite TV theme tunes are currently from superhero cartoons. The best of them is the Teen Titans theme. It’s a terrific show very much in the Japanese style throughout, all the characters looking rather like 6 year olds, except with added breasts for the girls of course, with enormous eyes, and exaggeratedly cartooned expressions. The song fits with that – it sounds like a translation from another language, and the singer doesn’t sound as if she really speaks English, with odd emphases and the occasionally not-quite-nailed syllable, but it’s first-rate high energy J-pop with the delivery matching the lyrics beautifully (especially on “When the team go on the attACK!”), and it makes me smile and sing (okay, shout) along with it every time I hear it.
Marvel do less well than DC (I’m ignoring for instance the superb Batman and JLA shows because they don’t have words in their themes)(you see, it says ‘songs’ above). The Hulk theme is very lame, a leaden rock sound with lyrics that seem to consist of only “Hulk… Hulk… Incredible Hulk” in a faux-macho voice. Iron Man fares little better, with something that sounds as if it’s more referring to the old Black Sabbath classic than to the Marvel superhero (actually, that makes it sound much better than it is). (Ha, a pal of mine once composed a version of the old Spidey tune (“Does whatever a spider can”) for Iron Man (“…presses clothes, nice and flat…”).)(Anyone remember the ancient Thor theme? Sounded like an Asgardian drinking song. All together now: “From the rainbow halls of Asgard…” I’m the only one singing, aren’t I?)(yes, shouting)
Anyway, the worst of the lot is the Fantastic Four. The cartoon is pretty poor, despite most of the stories being based on Kirby Klassiks, but the theme is a desperately lame soft rock number, thankfully not so Bryan Adams and painfully sincere as the even worse Enterprise theme (out of scope here), but even weedier. The lyrics start “On an outer space adventure / They were hit by cosmic rays…” which is probably as much as you need to know. (also Stan Lee always introduces the show, which is irritating)
(I don’t really know whether to put this on Brown Wedge because comics or NYLPM because tunes or Do You See because TV shows, dammit. Thankfully no one will care, so…)