Theme songs, where you could find them anywhere, no matter movies, TV dramas, cartoon, advertisements, or even some video games have one. However, nowadays when comparing with the Asian world, the Western seems to treat it as a less vital element in their media, is it really true?
As we all known that, the U.S. is still dominating the whole media industries, the popularity of Hollywood Movies, US Drama, and TV advertisements as well since the U.S. is where quite a portion of famous brands was originated from. But the question is, does their theme songs as popular as the product themselves? Obviously not, most of the time we didn’t realise that actually their movies and dramas have one, or some of them had included many soundtracks, but none of them had been specified as a ‘theme song’.
As the video ‘The Marvel Symphonic Universe’ mentioned, only a few movies, especially movie series could come out a noticeable one, for example, the Star War, Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, where having a totally different style between the recent’s. The famous YouTube channel (I guess owning over 1m of subscribers should be defined as famous?), Every Frame a Painting had used the Marvel (yeah, the MCU again) as an example to prove this hypothesis, that pretty an amount of Hollywood movies had somehow lower the exposure rate of their theme songs, such as only play it at the ending credits when most of us start leaving the theater house. As well as, sometimes they were using movie soundtracks interchangeably, played by the same symphony orchestra or kept producing pieces with a similar ‘Hollywood style’. Perhaps, production companies still think that musics in movies would never be as influential as the who act them, or the bunch of FXs they used (well, maybe that’s true, we can’t imagine a world that people having interest in movies because of their music).
Yet, sometimes songs from TV commercial would accidentally become extremely famous as well, in My place, Hong Kong, certain commercial songs had gone viral because of their eye-catching melody, such as the ‘Eyebrow Dance’ by Cadbury and ‘Stand by me’ by Vitasoy that both premiered in the year of 2009, where at that time many of us would like to download them and set them as our phone’s ringtone.
In the next post, would be discussing the universality and popularity about the use of theme songs in Asia media, such as Korean dramas, Japanese Animes and how theme songs in the Greater China (including HK and TW) work. Everyone loves to watch all the episodes in one sitting (like on Netflix), right?