What Was That? French Horns.
Although the blogs I researched yesterday failed to fill me with joy, they were a fruitful source of “you gotta see this” links. The top 100-200 list on bash.org, for example, made me laugh to the point of tears. And, while the LOLcats were just drek, I confess I laughed at the dramatic chipmunk film clip.
(No, don’t go see it. This is already moving to the internet meme phenomenon list, where “All your base are belong to us” resides. Before it passes, you will be sick to death of dramatic chipmunk. Chances are good you’ve already seen it; I am terminally unhip, and catch memes after everyone else on my block does. All right, all right; if you’re even less hip than I, you can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs. But I take no responsibility. I only brought the damn thing up because I wanted to talk about Darth Vader.)
Darth Vader is one of the all-time ass-kickin’est villains around, despite his overblown villainy. His general excessiveness blends in with the equally excessive Star Wars setting, putting him right up in the same league as Ming the Merciless, Long John Silver, the evil queen from Snow White, the Joker in his better moments, and Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. The reason dramatic chipmunk reminds me of Darth Vader is that both are a triumph of sound. The black cape is fine, but the outfit as a whole, and especially those red and blue Lego bricks he wears as rank insignia, would just look stupid without the voice of James Earl Jones to back it up. Our first intimation of Vader is auditory, too: the evil overlord march begins before we see the man in the suit, and we remember that theme better even than the movie’s theme song. An entire generation still thrills to the soft rasp of Vader’s breathing mechanism, especially when accompanied by the whummmm of a light saber. Play those two sound tracks behind a drowsing 30-something just as he’s dozing off, and you might get him to wet his pants.
People will take you seriously if you’ve got a good sound track, whether they’re aware of it or not. Dramatic chipmunk is a bloody guinea pig, or maybe a prairie dog, but he looks like he’s actually got something up his furry sleeve when you give him a horn cue. Contrive to get the band to play that crescendo as if by coincidence when you enter your next big business reception, and you’ll be noticed. Positively, despite the obvious humor of the situation. We’re conditioned by a lifetime of movies and television to pay attention to people with their own musical cue. Arranging a silence for your theme music to drop into is more difficult, of course, especially if your rivals for your next big promotion decide the trick works, and start employing it themselves, and the trick, like all advertising tricks, becomes over-copied and ignored.
But until then, I think I’ve got a gimmick that will get me in with an editor. Now I just gotta find the right piece, a band that’ll work cheap, and an editor to try it on.