Posted 5:58 PM by Gene

I am convinced one thing that started the slow decline in network television was the way the Fred Silverfish bean counters played with the theme songs in the sixties; it was their equivalent of the bugs and the snipes, and the audience knew it was being tampered with. For evidence we have no further to look than those two superb numbers "Cousins" (Patty Duke's theme) and the immortal "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!". Everyone must recall their jazzy lusty arrangements (I mean that in the old sense, but a little as well in the new). Then the creators changed them to something much less appealing; remember Patty Rock? Allen Funt changed his show's twice in two years. Both shows died quickly. We can lament that a good theme song isn't possible anymore, especially when the themes were frequently the only good part of many series (witness The Jetsons). With their dubious use of photography double-exposed and hidden the notion applied to these two shows more than most, but that their songs have so long survived them, that they can invoke happiness even today, is not at all astonishing; they were mini-courses in music appreciation.

I mention this for two reasons: first Sid Ramin wrote both; he was a childhood friend and lifelong associate of Leonard Bernstein's (and easily confused with Irwin Kostal, who also worked with Lenny and with Ramin); and second yesterday I found a site with three separate high-quality 320K downloads of the Candid Camera theme, an amazement as nearly every fifth-rate site devoted to TV themes as they almost all are has the same version from one of the late unlamented TVT Records's junk anthologies -- straight from a video soundtrack and overlaid with laughter. I've listened to this at least 200 times and expect to play it another 10,000. (This site also has three tracks of the allegedly missing 1970 theme music from The Hollywood Squares, something like fifty takes of the mentally-challenged cues from the original Family Feud, and -- I'm still downloading.)