Something for Thursday

I missed last week, boo! But I’m back this week, yay!

Setting aside the Song Challenge thing for a while, here’s a nifty bit of movie music…for a teevee movie, anyway. Back in 1983 there was a miniseries on NBC (a two-part movie, basically) called V, in which alien “visitors” appeared in giant ships to contact humanity. Their stated reason for visiting was benign, or so they said, but they quickly turned out to be liars who took over the planet and assumed control as they started robbing the Earth of its liquid water (which, the show told us, is “the rarest, most precious commodity you can imagine, and Earth is blessed with an abundance of it”) and harvest humans for food. Now, ignore the ludicrous nature of the show’s SF premise (there’s a shitload of water out there in the universe), the show was a lot of fun and it had some sober things to say about the nature of resistance in the face of evil. But the first installment left things unresolved, so along the next year came V: The Final Battle, which wrapped up the story over three nights. After some really convoluted stuff in the plot department (the first series was much more tightly written), the humans finally achieved victory by developing a biological agent that would poison the Earth’s atmosphere to the aliens (the “Visitors”) but be harmless to humans. The humans dispersed this stuff via hot air balloons in a nifty sequence that was pretty entertaining for a war show, eschewing a giant final battle for a more passively peaceful way of depicting victory. (There was action stuff that played out alongside this, of course, because you had to have some kind of action finale.)

The scene in which the balloons launch at dawn is accompanied by this music, which is as charmingly 1980s as you can get, with synths and drum samples and sounds that mimic whale songs, before the soaring melody arrives. It’s hard not to be cheered and buoyed by music like this. This is the kind of thing I grew up with, folks!

Here’s “The Balloon Theme” from V: The Final Battle.

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