Saturday 6 August 2022

Saturday excitement from Barry Gray and Stingray

I've previously posted concerning the excellent TV themes of Barry Gray, especially for Gerry Anderson's shows. 

In my occasional series of 'music on Saturdays'; here's a reprise of the Stingray theme in a terrific version for concert band. It looks as if they are having a great time:


5 comments:

Ron Tomlinson said...

Very good!

I recently re-discovered this theme by Peter Howell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pf1DBaHs7M

Amazingly, it didn't have its own sci-fi show (though it deserved one, don't you think?), being used merely for a Horizon programme in 1977 and a few other bits and pieces.

Bruce Charlton said...

@RT - Yes, that's a good theme - to me, it conjures up a feeling of espionage.

a_probst said...

As a kid I would have thought this the best way to hear the Stingray theme, as it was the most embarrassing of Gerry Anderson's show openings for the youngest child in a family to watch within earshot of parents and sci-fi disinclined older siblings, Torchy the Battery Boy not having been distributed in my neck of the woods.

But that was only the most embarrassing of Anderson's. The absolute distinction must go to the openings of American versions of the Japanese anime shows Astro Boy and Prince Planet.

Bruce Charlton said...

@ap - I don't get it. I was very excited, not at all embarrassed! But maybe I was/am younger than you.

a_probst said...

Or your TV wasn't in a living room un-doored from the dining room and the kitchen. Maybe you were allowed to be a kid.

I often rode the volume control because my mother was disturbed by screams and yells (I didn't like them because they were cheap dramatics but I could suffer them). She and Mary Whitehouse would have seen eye-to-eye there. My mother, at core, really didn't care for fiction even in her reading.

As a former musician, she liked what she overheard from the kitchen of Alexander Courage's background scores for Star Trek. She commented once on the dullness of the score of one of Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes. Can't say I disagreed but if I knew then what I learned later, I would have played her a recording of Sibelius' 4th Symphony, first movement, to show her that the style was grounded in modern Romanticism.