Cantina Band Covers: Genre Evolution in Adaptations of “Mad About Me”
Location
Rosen Classroom 111
Start Date
21-6-2024 4:45 PM
Description
The Walt Disney Company’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd. ushered in a new era for the Star Wars franchise that includes adaptations for television, video games, and theme parks. The music of these adaptations and their interaction with John Williams’s original soundtracks for the nine films of the Skywalker saga has been the topic of much recent scholarship (Bradford, 2022; Camp, 2022; Crosby, 2022; Lawson, 2022). These studies focus primarily on allusions to Williams’s Romantic underscoring and memorable character themes, giving little attention to adaptations of diegetic music from the original trilogy. To fill this void, this study provides a comparative analysis of performances of the first diegetic Star Wars music “Mad About Me” (also known as Cantina Band Music I) within the Star Wars universe. Building on existing analyses of covers of popular songs (Mosser, 2008; O’Hara, 2022; Rusch, 2013), this study highlights variations in timbre, form, and melody in adaptations of the base song for video games, television, and Disney theme parks. These alterations in the cover versions of the tune result in a dramatic genre shift—Jazz to EDM—that not only represents the transition from diegetic film music to the double-diegesis of the theme park experience (Camp, 2022), but also reframes a 1970s cultural phenomenon to be more culturally relevant to a new generation of fans.
Recommended Citation
Crosby, Lauren, "Cantina Band Covers: Genre Evolution in Adaptations of “Mad About Me”" (2024). Theme Park Music and Sound. 12.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2024/friday/12
Cantina Band Covers: Genre Evolution in Adaptations of “Mad About Me”
Rosen Classroom 111
The Walt Disney Company’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd. ushered in a new era for the Star Wars franchise that includes adaptations for television, video games, and theme parks. The music of these adaptations and their interaction with John Williams’s original soundtracks for the nine films of the Skywalker saga has been the topic of much recent scholarship (Bradford, 2022; Camp, 2022; Crosby, 2022; Lawson, 2022). These studies focus primarily on allusions to Williams’s Romantic underscoring and memorable character themes, giving little attention to adaptations of diegetic music from the original trilogy. To fill this void, this study provides a comparative analysis of performances of the first diegetic Star Wars music “Mad About Me” (also known as Cantina Band Music I) within the Star Wars universe. Building on existing analyses of covers of popular songs (Mosser, 2008; O’Hara, 2022; Rusch, 2013), this study highlights variations in timbre, form, and melody in adaptations of the base song for video games, television, and Disney theme parks. These alterations in the cover versions of the tune result in a dramatic genre shift—Jazz to EDM—that not only represents the transition from diegetic film music to the double-diegesis of the theme park experience (Camp, 2022), but also reframes a 1970s cultural phenomenon to be more culturally relevant to a new generation of fans.