Entrance music is important. Get the right tune and people will forever have a dual-sensory impression of your character. Most people like to craft original music to help fully embody the characters they create, but some people just lift classical themes to get the job done without all that pesky paying a composer. Characters like...
The Lone Ranger is one of the most enduring figures in American pop culture; a big-screen adaptation featuring Johnny Depp has been in the works at Disney since 2008. A Texas Ranger who survives a brutal attack and becomes a masked vigilante to bring the corrupt to justice, he's part John Wayne, part Batman, and all legend.
From the very beginning, the Ranger's traditional theme song was the "March of the Swiss Soldiers" finale from the overture of Gioachino Rossini's opera William Tell, and it's hard to imagine the character minus the music now. But what does it really mean?
Well, an overture is just a good musical warm-up, but the opera is based on the William Tell legend. Most of us know he shot an apple off the head of his son (with a crossbow, not a longbow as is usually seen in pop culture), but you may not know that the reason he did it was because he was forced to or both would die at the hands of an Austrian noble to whom Tell had refused to bow down.
After Tell did the trick shot, he tells the noble if he had missed the second bolt would've been buried in the noble's skull. Outraged, Tell is arrested, but escapes during a storm, kills the noble and basically led a Swiss insurgency against Austria that resulted in independence for 300 years. Tell helped win the war, and died saving the life of a drowning child in 1354. The Ranger and Tell obviously had a lot in common.
Another great figure who got his start in the radio-play days (and also the Lone Ranger's nephew) Britt Reid is a newspaper publisher who spends his evenings pursuing criminals the cops can't touch with his partner Kato. Comics and films about the Hornet, including this year's big-budget blockbuster starring Seth Rogen, have continuously been released since 1936.
Like his uncle, the Hornet had a catchy theme song, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee." The song would follow the characters across different mediums up until the present day. Also like the Lone Ranger, it started out as part of an opera. In this case the Tale of Tsar Saltan.
In the opera, a Tsaritsa's jealous sisters attempt to have her killed by sending false messages from her to her husband that the son she bore him while away at war was a monster. The Tsar orders his wife and son sealed in a barrel and thrown in the sea. They survive, and the young prince saves the life of a magic swan who transforms him into a bee to fly home to see his father.
In the course of his travels, he meets his mother's sisters and their accomplice Babarikha and stings them blind. Again, that's pretty appropriate for the Hornet's theme.
