Little Obsessions: Finding a Song

One of my weirder little interests is production music.

What is production music? Recordings meant for anyone to use, like stock music. To my understanding, you get to use it for a small fee in whatever it is you’re making, be it a TV show, film, what have you. As such, it’s very common in a lot of media. Some works of media use it for comedic effect.

For example, cartoons like The Ren & Stimpy Show and SpongeBob SquarePants made use of it. They mostly dipped into production music from the 50s and early 60s, and as such, that material gives the cartoons a retro-like quality in some ways, the former more so than the latter. Ren & Stimpy was meant to really feel like a 50s cartoon, albeit spruced up, SpongeBob also channels classics in some ways. The use of this kind of music only heightens that.

Stock music probably shows up just about anywhere, from commercials to small scenes in movies to other productions out there. Hence the name! There are massive libraries of this stuff, all housed under different labels over time. In my travels, I’ve found about labels like KPM, Bruton Music, Amphonic, De Wolfe, and many others!

So upon diving in, I came across a work called ‘Waltzing Flutes,’ composed by Gerhard Narholz. It was most famously used in a 2002 episode of SpongeBob, ‘Krusty Krab Training Video.’

It sounded so similar to a piece of music I’ve heard before… One that was used in, of all places, a Pixar film. Coincidentally, a Pixar film set mainly underwater.

In Finding Nemo, a few seconds of a flutey, lounge-y sounding composition can be heard minutes prior to the big escape from the dentist’s office. In most of the scenes set in Philip Sherman’s building, you hear this kind of elevator muzak. One recording actually can be heard in the studio’s previous feature, Monsters, Inc., in Roz’s office. That plays when Nemo and the Tank Gang watch Sherman operate on a patient. The piece I’m going to talk about plays when the dentist gets his niece Darla ready for her exam: “Alright, let’s see them pearly whites!” “Imma piranha, they live in the Amazon!” It ends right when P. Sherman lifts the bag Nemo is in, then we cut to Thomas Newman’s score.

Now, a little story time… I didn’t get Finding Nemo on DVD until Christmas Day 2003. Finding Nemo was released theatrically that preceding summer, I saw it three times in theaters. The video release occurred on November 4th, and I rented it (yes, rented, totally a thing of the past, I know!) nonstop until getting it for Christmas. Now in theaters and on the first couple of home video viewings, I didn’t pick up on this little track. I mean, why would I? It was just some random 15-or-so seconds of music. The menu on Disc Two and some of the special features on Disc One used that music, and after seeing those, I was curious… What is this vintage-sounding music? Is it even in the movie? I watched the movie again, caught it on the Darla scene. Eventually, the other question fell to the wayside.

So some 13 years later, I’m getting into stock music. I hear ‘Waltzing Flutes’ and I’m like, “Hey! That sounds a lot like that stock track from Finding Nemo!” Previously, I guess I had assumed it was some random background music playing on a radio somewhere. A piece special-made for the movie, perhaps?

‘Waltzing Flutes,’ as far as I can see, first came out in 1973, even though it sounds like it belongs in 1959. The recording was made by The Manfred Minnich String Orchestra, for a collection by production music company Studio One. There are about 10 tracks on the album… And I looked all around for them at one time, couldn’t find every single one online, but I was a little certain that this tune was on here. It just sounded way too similar, it had to be the same orchestra.

Then last night, when perusing APM Music’s website, I found it…

It was indeed on that 1973 Studio One album… The name of the piece is ‘Rosery.’ No, that’s actually how it’s spelt, it’s not about rosary beads or anything. The composers of it is Jan Schneeberg. APM has it in a collection called Really Cheezy, which to my knowledge was published sometime in the early aughts. How in the world did this get into a mainstream, seen-by-virtually-everybody Pixar film? Is director Andrew Stanton, already a real music junkie to begin with, a fan of production music? Why this specific track? Did someone at Pixar own the collection it came from?

The composition isn’t listed in the film’s end credits, and IMDB doesn’t have it listed either. If not for Finding Nemo, this track would probably be some really obscure little thing – but a ton of people have heard it.

I wonder how much of this stuff is really hard to find if you’re not digging for it.

In the end, a weird side-obsession has been fulfilled. What is a weird, obscure, minuscule obsession of yours?