WHY IS THE X-MEN THEME SONG SO CATCHY? ‘IT JUST RIPS,’ SAY X-MEN ’97 COMPOSERS

Taylor Stewart and Andy Grush have been scoring movies together as the Newton Brothers for 15 years. They’ve worked with contemporary greats like Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman, they composed the scores for Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Fall of the House of Usher, and they just spent who knows how long marinating in the music of X-Men: The Animated Series in order to craft the music for its sequel, X-Men ’97.

So what, in their professional opinion, makes the original, indelible X-Men: The Animated Series theme so memorable?

“The lick is just super catchy,” Grush told Polygon via video. “It repeats multiple times. Even when it modulates it’s playing the same thing — we’re moving up and then moving back down. And then I love the triplets section that it goes to. It’s brilliant. It changes everything up, feels very dramatic and dynamic, and then you get right back into [the lick]. And it just, like...” He paused, considering. “It just rips. [...] That’s the only way I can describe it. It just rips.

“Taylor and I feel really lucky to have been able to work with that material.”

That material was the work of composer Ron Wasserman, who also scored such 1990s standbys as the opening theme to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Stewart and Grush both hold it in fan reverence. Nevertheless, the first question they had to answer was whether to simply replicate Wasserman’s driving, synth-forward theme, or to reinvent it for a new show and a new decade.

Stewart said they prepped seven or eight different takes on the Animated Series theme for review. Some were fully orchestral, some synth-heavy, “some were way more modern, a couple sad and more minimal.” From there the process was all about balance.

Nostalgia, or an update? “We wanted to keep it based in the original that we all love, because that’s what we remember as kids. That’s what we all get excited about,” Stewart said. Original analog synth machines, or modern digital ones? Grush said he relished a chance to use a plug-in version of a Yamaha DX7 in the show’s “Summers” theme, a ubiquitous instrument of ’80s pop music that he’d never been able to afford as a kid.

And how much sound was too much sound?

That question was at the heart of their most notable digression from Wasserman’s original theme song: minimizing the counterpoint in the song’s final section. You can hear it by comparing the two tracks below — the underpinning of synth strings and a final bell note is much more muted in the new theme.

Far be it for Polygon to nitpick the choices of a couple of experienced composers, but as a former mallet percussionist and player of the tubular bells, this writer had to ask.

To Stewart and Grush, the difference was in the weight and power of modern instruments, synths, and digital sound. “We got to a place where the track was all there, but it was too big. There was too much happening,” Grush explained. “And so then it was like, Well, let’s take some of the new modern synths out and leave the counterpoint in. And it was like, Well, now it doesn’t have some of the weight that that has. So then we put those back in, and then we muted some of the counterpoint — not all of it, we kept in some of the counterpoint at the end. But we lost it in the triplet section, and we lost most of the tubular bells too, because it was just real estate. The short answer is real estate.”

But even after finding that balance in X-Men ’97 season 1 (a second season is already in production), Stewart and Grush find themselves with just as many questions as when they started.

“We want to take Ron [Wasserman] to dinner. We want to ask him so many things,” Grush said. “From our understanding from the World Wide Web, which could be totally wrong, it was that they didn’t give him a ton of resources in season 1 and he still pulled off this incredible score. [...] We’re hoping to be able to take Ron to dinner, if he’ll have us at some point, because we have so many questions.”

New episodes of X-Men ’97 drop every Wednesday on Disney Plus.

2024-04-17T14:11:03Z dg43tfdfdgfd