Sunday, February 24, 2008

TCM's 31 Day-o-Ram

This was on the Turner Classic Movies site, and I thought it was wonderful. Apparently it's based on an invention called the Panoram, an early video jukebox which played what were, in essence, the forerunners of music videos. Everything old is new again.

The 31 Day-o-Ram plays an assortment of opening and closing credit sequences, musical numbers, and theme tunes for a number of Oscar-nominated and -winning movies. Along with some obvious ones (the themes from Jaws and The Great Escape) there are some less obvious, but equally deserving, selections: listen to George Delerue's wonderful opening credits music for A Man For All Seasons (and spot a young, or youngish, Leo McKern), and then be dazzled by the exuberance of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor performing the 'Moses Supposes' number from Singin' in the Rain. And you don't even have to put a nickel in the jukebox!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing this, Barbara. God, I love film scores! (I have hundreds on CD. They get along quite well with the thousands of books lining the walls.)

Barbara Roden said...

Glad you enjoyed it! I have about 150 film scores on either CD or album; favourites include John Williams's score for the 1979 "Dracula", John Addison's for "Sleuth", Nino Rota's for "Death on the Nile", Bruce Broughtons's for "Silverado", Max Steiner's for "King Kong", Erich Wolfgang Korngold's for "The Adventures of Robin Hood", and Geoffrey Burgon's for the TV version of "Brideshead Revisited". Wonderful music on its own, but so many great memories tied up with the films as well!