Professor of Rock

Every now and again I have an idea for a show, and as I put it together I’m blown away by the stories behind the songs and the fact that they’ve never been shared before. That’s this episode in a nutshell. Today, we’re counting down the Top 10 songs that soundtracked your favorite TV game shows. And itspacked with more scandals, schemes, and behind-the-scenes absurdity than about any episode I’ve done. Game show music just might be the most underestimated music in television… engineered down to the beat to make your pulse race and keep your eyes glued to the screen. We’ve got the story of an unemployed Ice Cream Truck driver who spent weeks freeze-framing episodes on his VCR to figure out how beat the system and he actually cracked the code… He accrued more than $100k and there was nothing the show could do about it. Then there’s the Family Feud theme song that has been pumping up viewers for decades on one of TV’s longest-running game shows. Only that song was stolen from a musical cue from the #1 game show of the time… Plus the Jeopardy theme was actually a lullaby that the game show mogul made up to get his baby son to sleep. Years later when he sold the rights to the game show he smartly held on to the song rights, and it ended up making him over 100 million in royalties. Let’s go back in time… ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executive Producer Brandon Fugal Honorary Producers Robert Taylor, Missy D, Stan Summay, MG, David Fritz ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to the Professor of Rock Podcast Apple: https://apple.co/445fVov Spotify: https://spoti.fi/42JpfvU Amazon: https://amzn.to/44b5D6m iHeartRadio: https://bit.ly/444h8MO ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patreon: http://bit.ly/ProfessorofRockVIPFan Merch Store: https://professor-of-rock-lsn-shop.fourthwall.com/ Instagram: https://bit.ly/Instagram_Professor_of_Rock #classicrock #80smusic #vinylstory #70smusic Hey music junkies Professor of rock always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest songs of all time. well We’ve covered TV themes, Cartoon themes, ad jingles and it’s only natural that we get into Game show themes and we got some great ones that will take you back to the good old days… Launching today’s countdown, at #10 it’s the theme song from the $10,000 Pyramid… or is it $25,000 or how about $100,000? The Pyramid game show has been through so many iterations that it’s hard to agree on what it should be called. And the theme song has evolved to match. But get this, the theme to one of TV’s tensest word games was reportedly built with… scissors? According to TV music lore, sound engineers literally chopped up sheet music and shuffled the pieces to create the track. The story starts in 1973, when the daytime version o the $10,000 Pyramid debuted with Dick Clark as host. The show paired contestants with celebrity partners in a rapid-fire battle of clues. In the main game, players raced a 30-second clock to describe words or phrases in specific categories. The highest-scoring team moved to the Winner’s Circle, a 6-box triangular board where one partner gave list-style clues for specific categories while the other tried to guess all 6 in 60 seconds to win the grand cash prize. Incidentally, Before becoming a major Hollywood movie star, Billy Crystal was a frequent celebrity guest on The $20,000 Pyramid. In 1977, Crystal set a legendary world record by helping his contestant partner sweep all six categories in the Winner’s Circle in a dizzying 26 seconds out of the allotted 60 seconds, establishing him as one of the most sought-after celebrity partners in game show history. At first, the Pyramid’s theme relied on a production library track called “Tuning In,” composed by Ken Aldin. But as the show moved into higher-stakes daytime and syndicated runs, producers wanted a fresh sound. They brought in composer Bob Cobert to overhaul the music… who was best known for his dark, gothic scoring on Dark Shadows. Cobert gave it a major rearrangement, mostly to avoid copyright issues. The lore says audio engineers cut physical sheet music into two-bar pieces and rearranged them out of order to make sure the track was mixed up enough. For this #9 entry, picture contestants sprinting down grocery aisle with giant hams under their arms while a jazz quartet plays in odd time. That’s how this next game show sounded in the 60s. Who’s ready to go shopping on Supermarket Sweep? The show debuted on ABC in 1965 and run through 1967. And for this one producer David Susskind skipped the usual game show jingle writers and secured the rights to jazz royalty: The Dave Brubeck Quartet. Contestants loaded hams and canned turkeys to complex, odd-meter tempos like