Music
Is it just me or is the opening music the same as for The Island Earth??
Or am I watching too much MST???
I had the same thought when I last saw this on cable tv about a year or two ago. I'm pretty sure they used the same music. This is a bit off the topic, but have you ever seen the 1956 JD movie from Columbia called Rumble on the Docks? It's about two rival teenage gangs in Fifties Brooklyn, that combines elements of On the Waterfront with West Side Story. A lot of the music is taken from Columbia's 1954 movie The Wild One, with Marlon Brando as the leader of a motorcycle gang. I guess it must have been a common practice for low budget studios to re-use a lot of stock music. I read also that a lot of the music by Max Steiner for the l933 King Kong was used for years as accompaniment to all kinds of movies, because it was so dramatic and scary. I have seen one or two old movies where I suddenly recognized the music as being part of the Kong score. I' m fascinated by the whole concept of movie music, because it's a vital part of so many classic films. Just think of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's scores for The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bernard Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane, Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia, etc. I've mentioned elsewhere that Leonard Rosenman's score for the 1960 gangster flick The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond utilizes a theme at certain points that is very much like the planetarium music from Rebel Without A Cause five years earlier. You can tell I have a lot of time on my hands, or else just a fascination with movies and music in general.
And when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him
I hear bits and pieces of the Night of the Living Dead (1968) score all over the place, so much that I've about convinced myself it's made up of "drop-needle" tracks.
An original score I hear copied and ripped off all the time is Wojciech Kilar's music for Coppla's 'Dracula.' Most recently, I heard bits of it in one of those execrable 'Twilight' movies.