Lalo Schifrin -- Theme from "Mission: Impossible"

 

Your mission, if you choose to accept it...

I may have been less than a year old when the original "Mission: Impossible" series came on CBS in September 1966, but my earliest television memories are the opening credits montage sequence, the tape recorded message and Jim Phelps looking over who was going to be in on this week's mission. Oh, of course, there was also the theme song by Lalo Schifrin for which my mother told me with no lack of mirth that I had a very visceral reaction. Apparently, I was bouncing in my Pampers when that iconic theme came on, but I guess even back then, I had an ear for the coolest tunes.

And so for this week's ROY article, I'm going with another beloved American lawman show theme to join the themes from "Dragnet" and "Peter Gunn". But unlike those articles which had the avant-garde group Art of Noise do their cover versions, I'm sticking with the original Schifrin version. Indeed, it is one of the most recognizable themes on television no matter the nation and as soon as one hears it, I'm sure that those famous repeated scenes, mask-ditching, espionage derring-do...and Tom Cruise come to mind, although for nostalgia's sake, so do Peter Graves and Martin Landau.

These pieces of information haven't appeared on the Wikipedia article for the song, so I'm wondering if they are apocryphal. However, one piece is that Schifrin had actually originally created the theme as background music for a particularly intense scene in an episode of "The Man From UNCLE", another 60s spy show; Schifrin was involved with at least a few of the episode scores. The other trivia point is that the "Mission: Impossible" theme was played presumably once on ABC's "American Bandstand", that popular music-and-dance show hosted by Dick Clark, only for things to come to a screeching halt because the kids couldn't figure out how to dance to it.

Ah, yes. Tom Cruise. There was the late 1980s return of the series on ABC with Graves once more which started out well but petered out (no pun intended) fairly quickly. However, I was in Japan when Paramount Pictures decided to bring "Mission: Impossible" to the big screen with the actor who would become the world's most famous stunt man with the first of the movie franchise coming out in 1996. Even though I was no longer bouncing around on my butt in the theatre, it was still a thrill to catch the trailer with the famous catchphrases and the original Schifrin theme. When I first saw the movie, though, I had to admit to some disappointment since the production team decided to break two M:I commandments: they killed off the team, making Ethan Hunt the overarching one-man IMF team with a few recruits helping out here and there; plus, they made Jim Phelps a bad guy. In the quarter-century since that first movie, though, I've been much more accepting of it, and I have to say that Brian DePalma put in a lot of style and Danny Elfman put out a bristling version of the theme song.

In the leadup to the release of the 1996 movie, I was at Tower Records in Shibuya when I saw a counter selling Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen's dance remix take on the Schifrin theme. Yeah, I think that I was spending an inordinate amount of time at the listening post for that one.

Since the DePalma movie, we've had a total of six "Mission: Impossible" movies with Cruise up to now with different directors and composers. Plus, we should be getting another couple of them coming down the pike in the next few years. With all of the intrigue and "Can you top this?!" stunts (I'm guessing that Cruise will have to crawl around the International Space Station before jumping onto a Space X capsule to get back to a yurt in Mongolia in the next flick), I still look forward to the opening credit montage and how the Schifrin theme is handled. No more bouncing around, though.

Although a single of the Schifrin theme was released in 1967, I'm going to go with the debut year of the original series in 1966. So, what were the award winners at the Japan Record Awards back then?

Grand Prize: Yukio Hashi -- Muhyou （霧氷）

Best New Artist: Ichiro Araki -- Sora ni Hoshi ga Aruyou ni（空に星があるように）

Best Composer: Kuranosuke Hamaguchi/浜口庫之助 for Mike Maki -- Bara ga Saita （バラが咲いた）