Another post for theme songs, as the writer is an Asian, who’s now studying Asian Culture as his Contextual studies stream, who loves and wants to work in Asian media (well…mainly Korea and Taiwan, Australian’s are also quite creative anyway), and of course, a sound passionate, in the last initiative post of the first semester, he still wants to have an Asian theme song tour with you guys.
Let’s just start with the demographically closest one, the Greater China, which means, the Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are actually sharing a similar habit on applying theme songs in their media. First of all, the advertisement industry that theme songs (commercial songs) are widely used as a promotion gimmick, where most of them has lyrics that showing the characteristic of that specific product. Here are song famous commercial songs in my childhood:
Interestingly, quite an amount of them had used a kind of ‘Earworm’ song that contains simple lyrics with a repeated melody to force you memorise them even you had just watched it, such as, the Gatsby ad at 2:03 (which originally came from Japan) and the toothbrush ad at 3:31 which kept repeating the only word ‘尖, zim’ (which means sharp in English). As well as, some of the brands would hire a well-known singer with adapted the lyric from their songs to a product-related one, or composed a brand new song for a specific ad (e.g. 2:35, Tao-ti by Andy Lau).
cr. YouTube
Besides commercial use, theme songs had played a huge role in TV Dramas as well. No matter in Hong Kong, Taiwan or the Mainland, most of the drama would contain an opening and an ending song (or several if that drama could be separated by chapters), by using an existing song or composing a specialised one. This idea was originated from Japanese Anime, as sometimes Anime could have more than a hundred episodes, they have to change their theme songs after a certain while in order to coordinate with the changing of chapters, and to be more attractive and competitive (the longest one, One Piece had currently released 866 episodes which has both 19 songs for the opening and ending), which I had never seen in Western’s dramas and cartoons before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0yptepXJIM
A memorable HK drama’ theme song which the original version is no longer exist
Lastly, the Korean Drama, which I had mentioned before in week 10’s Lectorial post, all of their drama had at least one theme song (or called OST with lyrics), which usually being played at the end of an episode that accompanied with the ending credits and preview, or at the middle of it that had been instrumentalised as one of the soundtracks.
One of my favourite sci-fi drama,
which the title music had been more famous than its theme songs
However, it depends on the genre difference of dramas, a criminal type one may sometimes lower the presence of their theme song (where they still have one), and keep rolling a more eye-catching background music constantly instead; Oppositely, a more romantic one would tend to hire several famous singer or idol group members for performing their OSTs, which most of their soundtrack may involved lyrics rather than just using background musics, quite a vast music industry, isn’t it?