Good morning 🐣

It’s one of the most recognizable musical compositions of all time: two quick notes — dun dun — followed by a longer, drawn out DUUUN.

I know you’ve heard it before. It’s been in just about everything: sitcoms, cartoons, advertisements, movies, and more. It signals something really, really dramatic is about to happen. The rug’s been pulled out from under you and there’s no turning back. You’re doooooomed.

It’s so over the top that it seems to have always been used for comedic effect. But where did it come from? How long have we used this sound in our storytelling? It’s actually kind of hard to trace, but Amelia Tait explores its history for The Guardian:

“Suspense,” an American horror show broadcast on CBS Radio between 1942 and 1962, was filled to the brim with sound effects and dramatic stings. Just over three minutes into its first episode (after bells, the sound of a train, and plenty of piano), a three-beat sting lingers on its last note when a man discovers his wife is potentially an undead poisoner. But it’s difficult to pinpoint the very first on-air dun dun duuun, and it’s likely the musical phrase predates the radio. [Media professor Richard] Hand says the medium tended to adopt already popular tropes to entice listeners. “They imported that musical structure and musical language,” he says, pointing to Victorian stage melodramas.

It’s a quick read with lots of great audio and video samples. “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” has an especially fun one.

Now watch this 👀

1982 was one heck of a year for movies. Forty years ago we got bombarded with:

• “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,”
• “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,”
• “Blade Runner,”
• “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,”
• “Conan the Barbarian,”
• “Poltergeist,”
• “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,”
• “TRON,”
• and like a bajillion others.

But the thing that stands out the most for me is… “The Thing” (Peacock and on demand) because it has quite possibly my favorite movie monster of all time. The film actually got lost in all the hubbub of 1982 and was torn apart by critics. Now it’s a certified classic and was recently screened in theaters for its 40th anniversary. As it should be.

Forty years doesn’t sound right. It was less than ten years old when I was born. And now it’s 40. I’m just staring at that number and it doesn’t make sense. But I’m instantly taken back to reading movie magazines as a kid. They always had cool features on how special effects were made or why filmmakers did things a certain way. You can see Rob Bottin, who was only 22 at the time, above on the cover of Cinefantastique with one of his creations for the film juxtaposed with a photo of him, director John Carpenter, and an animatronic. Or in the pages of an old issue of Fangoria.

Bottin created the goopiest, most chaotic creature ever seen on screen. The Thing is a chameleon if chameleons split wide open, spray you with some foul alien gunk, wrap their tentacles around you, and assimilate you into an exact copy, down to your very thoughts and memories. Rather than make it red and bloody, Bottin used bubblegum and melted plastic to give it otherworldly colors. Faces and limbs appear where they shouldn’t be. Heads pull away from their bodies, sprout spider legs, and scurry away.

Burt Lancaster’s (yes, Burt Lancaster) son, Bill, wrote the script and his only other screenwriting credit is basically “The Bad News Bears.” Weird. It’s based on a 1938 novella titled “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr., which had previously been adapted in 1951 as “The Thing from Another World.”

The studio had been trying to make a new version for a few years, even working for a while with Tobe Hooper, the director of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Poltergeist.” But it wasn’t until 1979’s “Alien” came along — a movie with a similar premise of blue-collar workers completely isolated from society, trying to help someone in distress, and bringing home a predatory alien that hides inside people — that the studio was convinced it could work and settled on director/cinematic saint John Carpenter. (My god, do I even need to list the original “Halloween,” “The Fog,” “Escape From New York,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” and “Big Trouble in Little China?”)

Carpenter hired master composer Ennio Morricone (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) for the score, only to use a fraction of the music. (Three of the unused tracks would show up three decades later in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” — another movie starring Kurt Russell trapped in snow — and you can listen to the original tracks on YouTube: “Eternity,” “Bestiality,” and “Despair.”) But the music that remains in “The Thing” is elegantly stark, just like the barren Antarctic wastelands that surround our doomed characters.

Paranoia seeps into every corner of this movie. The Thing can be anyone, from the roller skating cook to the scientist ranting about how the creature could take over the world in a matter of years. And as loud and flamboyant as this thing can get when transforming into its prey, it’s never on the attack unless you walk in on it mid-lunch or push it into a corner. Then it’s in pure survival mode. I totally get that. And hey, if it doesn’t think it’s winning this fight, it can always dig into the ice and freeze itself for another couple thousand years.

But as the movie’s poster warns: “Man is the warmest place to hide.”

Until next time! 👋