Stealing from soundtracks

You may have missed the news that Arthur Ferrante died last week. He and his duettist, Lou Teicher, became famous in the 1960s for their two-piano versions of many popular movie themes, most notably the theme to Paul Newman's Exodus. However, their music doesn't appear in many movies; instead, they were doing remakes of movie songs.

This is by no means the first, and certainly wouldn't be the last, either. You've probably heard Roger Williams doing the theme to the Joan Crawford movie Autumn Leaves. Well, his piano rendition isn't the theme we hear in the movie, which is sung by Nat King Cole and has lyrics. The same is true for orchestra leader Percy Faith's huge hit of 1960, the theme from A Summer Place.

Perhaps one of the more extreme examples would be Meco. There were two things that were huge in 1977: the original Star Wars movie, and disco music. What better idea than to combine the two? The result was a huge hit, and an entire series of albums of disco versions of movie tunes. Prepare to be frightened.