I have never seen a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I started to watch the first one on streaming some years ago, but it glitched out in the opening scene, and that was that.
I am not the audience for these movies. But I do think, that’s a helluva catchy theme.
I also have a collector’s compulsion to put things in one place.
So—this morning I saw a video on Charles Cornell’s channel about the theme:
I like Charles’ analyses although I don’t always think they justify his wild enthusiasm.
The “insane” story is actually pretty sane: originally Alan Silvestri was the composer for the first Pirates, but Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t like what he was doing (which I can imagine was too “traditional”) and wanted Hans Zimmer. But Hans was contractually obligated to score The Last Samurai and couldn’t moonlight.
Hans moonlighted anyway and created a late-night demo of what we now all know as the Pirates theme—which, it turns out, is awfully similar to a battle theme from Gladiator. And it was then gang-scored, using his thematic material, by his team at Media Ventures (as it was known at the time).
A link to the above video on Facebook was helpfully commented upon by—Hans Zimmer!
Actually, Charles Cornell most of the themes were written in one night. There is a terrible demo of me trying to come up with the themes, because my friends Gore Verbinsky and Jerry Bruckheimer were a little desperate. So I sat down at 7:00 pm and finished at 4:56 (timestamp on demo…) I kept having ideas, but the fingers were much too tired to still play along. The drums stop in the middle of a bar, but it’s the basic material… and someone posted it on the internet. It’s highly embarrassing and highly comical!
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You can hear that demo here:
So there you go! All in one place.
Hans Zimmer has become kids' favorite composer when musical culture and musical history have become an embarassment...But he is a great public relations expert.