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 films together as the Newton Brothers for fifteen years. They have collaborated with contemporary greats such as Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman, for which they composed the scores Five nights at Freddy’s And The Fall of the House of Usherand they’ve just been marinated in the music of for who knows how long X-Men: The Animated Series to create the music for the 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 itself several times. Even as it modulates, it plays the same: we go up and then back down. And then I love the triplets section that it goes to. It’s brilliant. It changes everything, feels very dramatic and dynamic, and then you get right back into (the lick). And it was just…’ He paused and thought. “It is normal tears. (…) That’s the only way I can describe it. It just tears.
“Taylor and I feel really fortunate to have been able to work with that material.”
That material was the work of composer Ron Wasserman, who also scored such standbys from the 1990s the opening theme of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Stewart and Grush both hold it in reverence. Nevertheless, the first question they had to answer was whether to simply replicate Wasserman’s driving, synth-forward theme, or reinvent it for a new show and a new decade.
Stewart said they had prepared seven or eight different versions of the film Animated series theme for assessment. Some were completely orchestral, some synth-heavy, “some were much more modern, a few sad and minimalist.” From that moment on, the process was about balance.
Nostalgia or an update? “We wanted to keep it based on the original that we all love because that’s what we remember as kids. That’s what we’re all excited about,” Stewart said. Original analog synth machines or modern digital ones? Grush said he enjoyed the 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 could never have afforded as a child.
And how much noise was too much noise?
That question was at the heart of their most notable digression from Wasserman’s original theme song: minimizing counterpoint in the song’s final section. You can hear it by comparing the two songs below: the underpinning of synth strings and a final bell note is much more muted in the new theme.
Far be it from Polygon to nitpick the choices of a few veteran composers, but as a former mallet percussionist and player of the tubular bellsthis writer had to ask.
For 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 going on,” Grush explained. “And then it was like this, Let’s pull out some of the new modern synths and leave the counterpoint in. And it was like, Well, now it doesn’t have some of the weight that it does. So then we put that back in, and then we muted some of the counterpoint – not all of it, we kept some of the counterpoint at the end. But we lost it in the triplet section, and we also lost most of the tubular bells, because it was just real estate. The short answer is real estate.”
But even after you find that balance X Men ’97 Season 1 (a second season is already in production), Stewart and Grush are left with just as many questions as when they started.
‘We want to take Ron (Wasserman) out to dinner. We want to ask him so many things,” Grush said. “According to our understanding of the World Wide Web, which could be completely wrong, it was that they didn’t give him a lot of resources in Season 1 and he still got this incredible score. (…) We hope to be able to take Ron out to dinner if he ever wants us, because we have so many questions.”
New episodes of X Men ’97 drop every Wednesday on Disney Plus.