theme song

Hi escalera,

I was just over on the site for Terror in the Midnight Sun, re-reading our posts there from last April, then remembered that yesterday for no reason whatsoever I'd been thinking of the theme song to Journey to the Seventh Planet. So I thought I'd journey over here to see if anyone's mentioned it in a post. Well, golly, yes...and I find you, my friend, as the most recent poster here! Great minds do think alike....

But what I was thinking yesterday was how corny and gooey the (wonderful) closing theme song to this movie was. Before I bought the DVD, I hadn't heard it in 35 years or more, and I remember being devastated when I caught this cheapie on cable around 1990 or so. I sat through it in anticipation of hearing Otto Brandenburg, Scandinavia's answer to a question nobody asked (i.e., When you guys tire of Sinatra and Avalon, who do you listen to?), croon the deathless title tune. Imagine my horror when I discovered that the print used on Cinemax didn't have the song in it! All it had was, basically, the instrumental -- no lyrics. This movie was available on VHS but I never bought or watched it, assuming that the song was absent there too -- I've never found out if it was on it or not. But I bought the DVD (and also to get Invisible Invaders, of course), and was I surprised and delighted to hear Otto's dulcid tones wafting out o'er the cosmos once more...

Journey to the seventh planet
Come to me
Let your dreams become reality
I wait for you...

Somewhere on the seventh planet
Out in space
You and I will find a magic place
Like lovers do,
And why we --

Up above we'll touch the stars
That we have wished upon
There our love will take wings
And go on and on...

Mmmmm-mmmmmJourney to the seventh planet
In your eye
Let a spark of love begin to spy
For us to share
Forever --

Seventh planet!
Seventh heaven!
If you learn to care
Our love will be beyond compare.

(I chose to color the lyrics in a shade approximating Uranus's methane hue. Thought you'd appreciate the artistry.)

I sometimes wonder whether this ever got released as a single, and kids from Tromso to Silkeborg danced languidly 'neath the northern lights to the soothing smoothness of Otto Brandenburg ("Gate" to his friends) before hitting the vodka bars again...pardon me, no, they were still quaffing reindeer-based milkshakes in 1962. A simpler age. "Ohhhh, OT-toooohhhhh!!" the girls must've swooned, before toppling into the Skagerrak or nearest fjord.

Of course, as a song, it's much better, and certainly more appropriate, than the ditty sung in JTTSP's companion piece, Reptilicus, which sported some of the same cast, no doubt rushed quickly from one production to the other, probably because they still had the light. That jazzy number was entitled Tivoli Nights and was thoroughly inapt to a monster movie ("Tivoli nights, Oh what a sight, All Copenhagen is dan-cing!"). Yucko. Especially coming before Reptilicus knocks down the Lego Copenhagen the producer's kids had spent all afternoon constructing.

Of course, we cannot in all fairness give Otto sole credit, preeminent though he is as the warbler of the piece. Where would he or we be without the songwriting skills of Jerry Capehart and Mitchell Tableporter, of the renowned Broadway duo of Capehart and Tableporter, who took time away from their hot pursuit of a Tony to pen the music and approximate lyrics that close down this production? Joe Gillis, William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard, narrated, "Audiences don't realize someone actually sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along." Well, sublime as he was, neither did Otto Brandenburg, all by himself, make the song up, though the composers were happy to have him make it his own, and I've just done my bit to make sure that the critical contributions of Capehart & Tableporter will not go unheralded on this, the site dedicated to their greatest cinema triumph. (And although he had no part in authoring the song, we'll acknowledge the inestimable talent of composer Ib Glindemann, who resigned his commission with the Berlin Philharmonic to write the score for the film -- allegedly on the face of his one-way ticket back to Denmark -- incorporating so much of the haunting love theme that haunts us even today, nearly half a century later.)

Anyway, as a song, it's somewhere in the realm of Frankie Avalon's rendition, alluded to in an earlier post, of the title theme for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea...but it's light-years ahead of the absolute worst, dreariest, most inane and inappropriate title song ever conceived by the mind of man...for the 1954 sci-fi outing, Riders to the Stars. Now there's a song! Which, long ago, I thoughtfully posted, in full, on that site, for all to share. To quote Bela Lugosi...Bevare!!

And do you realize that, no matter how hard you try to avoid provoking titters in the pronunciation of the titular orb, you'll still get tripped up? People say "your A-nus" and then, embarrassed, unthinkingly amend it to "UR-ine us". Either way, it explains why screenwriters Ib Melchior and Sid Pink opted to use the vague but inoffensively descriptive term "Seventh Planet" to lure customers out of the snows and into the kinos, after which it was every man for himself.

Know what I think? I think there were one too many Ibs in this movie.

See you!