Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Hiro (Patreon)

Some of these soundtracks really just write themselves. I mean, just look at Hiro. Really, LOOK at the kid. He’s a spiky-haired sports junkie in a group of kids obsessed with seeing themselves as hot-blooded heroes and looking awesome. Heck, his name even SOUND like “hero!” What could this kid even POSSIBLY listen to other than adrenaline-pumping action movie montage music? You know the ones, the big 80s anthems with power chords and hot riff and scratchy howling vocals that play over a sweaty manly man doing sweaty manly things in rapid succession to show how awesome he is. THIS is what gets Hiro motivated: songs from action movies, songs that SHOULD have been in action movies, and parodies of songs from action movies but Hiro doesn’t get the joke. He’s a bit of a simple kid, that Hiro. And this is a bit of a simple soundtrack. Sometimes I can stretch these soundtrack blogs out with speculation on the psychological significance of the song choices, or nerdy factoids about the history of the bands and songs, but not here. Hiro’s not got much going on in that spiky head of his other than “desperately try to look awesome in front of people,” and the movies most of these songs were written for don’t have much else going for them than that either. At least, I don’t care enough about 80’s arena rock to actually find out about what deeper history might be lurking behind “Eye Of The Tiger” or it’s ilk. And it’s not like I can expound on the musical qualities of the various songs when they all sound virtually identical. I’m halfway convinced an entire crop of 80s vocalists were all grown together in the same lab, submerged in a vat of beer and cigarettes and mullet clippings. This could end up being the shortest character soundtrack blog I’ve done in a while. Oh, and I guess I gave a spoiler about the opening track of Hiro’s soundtrack. Oops.

Just to keep things somewhat organized, I’ve tried to lump these songs into the three groups I alluded to above: there’s the songs that are legitimately from 80s movies and may or may not have been used in montages, songs from the 80s that weren’t actually used in movies but totally sound like they were supposed to, and… the rest. I started to say “parodies of 80s montage songs” again, but looking over the track list again, most of the modern throwbacks included actually aren’t meant as jokes but are straight up sincere tributes to the era. And actually, one of the songs that seems like the funniest jokes NOW actually was legit recorded back in the 80s as… well, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s listening to all this fist-pumping music as I write this, it makes me go to fast!

First off, the obvious stuff: the movie soundtrack songs. I usually like to avoid doing too many well-known songs on these soundtracks, both because it feels lazy AND because it makes finding non-blocked videos on YouTube a bit of a chore, but there’s just no way around it here. Hiro likes his montage music, so we’re gonna have some big, major label artists doing songs for big studio movies and that’s that. Actually, I could sub-divide the movie song portion into two smaller groups: Stallone and Non-Stallone, because of COURSE several of these songs are from his movies. As I alluded before, Hiro’s soundtrack opens with the mother of all 80s action openers, Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger” as heard in Rocky III. Later on, we have Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out” from Rocky IV, which is only slightly less of a given in these circumstances. We also have “Far From Over” by Sly’s brother Frank Stallone, as heard in Staying Alive, which the better-known Stallone directed. Finally, we have Stan Bush’s “The Touch,” which many readers will object to seeing here, since everyone knows that song belongs to Optimus Prime. But in one of the few bits of trivia I DO care enough to mention here, Bush originally recorded “The Touch” for the Stallone film Cobra, only to recycle it in Transformers when the original production cut it. FACTS!

As for the other soundtrack choices, those run the gamut from “omnipresent pop culture touchstones” to “completely forgotten ephemera.” I haven’t even seen a few of the movies represented here, I just know the songs from my periodic binges on this kind of anthemic rock (I wind up binging just about every single genre under the sun at one point or another). There’s the really obvious stuff here, like Kenny Loggin’s “Danger Zone” from Top Gun or Robert Tepper’s “Push It To The Limit” from Scarface, ya can’t not have those. Then there’s the less remembered stuff like a pair of other Stan Bush songs from a pair of Jean-Claude van Damme movies: “Fight to Survive” from Bloodsport and “Never Surrender” from Kickboxer (which I’m reasonably sure are not, in fact, the same thing). But then there’s the stuff NOBODY remembers, like Mike Reno’s “Chasing The Angels” from Top Gun wannabe Iron Eagle II. Or better yet, there’s the classily named Billy Butt’s “Right To Fight” from Twin Dragon Encounter, which I’m pretty sure is EXCLUSIVELY remembered these days from being mentioned in Red Letter Media videos. From well known to well forgotten, though, Hiro would totally have any of these songs playing at full blast while training for some sports… thing… that he’d probably just fail at.

Moving away from songs recorded for film soundtracks to songs that SOUND like they were recorded for film soundtracks, and in several cases probably wound up in soundtracks after the fact, but that doesn’t count. Top of the heap is, of course “The Final Countdown” by Europe, with that immortal synth riff that makes every keytar player feel cool for four minutes. Less iconic but probably a lot more common on Classic Rock radio is Aldo Nova’s “Fantasy.” Seriously, this song sounds like the prototype for half the montage songs of the decade, but as far as I can tell the only soundtrack it’s been on was one of the Saints Row games. An even lesser known track by a much better known artist is also the first of several instrumentals on Hiro’s soundtrack: “Switch 625” by Def Leppard. Hey, some montages have dialog, like a motivational speech from the wise old mentor character or something like that, so ya gotta have a few instrumentals on hand, right? Another instrumental here is “Chase” by fusion band T-Square, who also serve as our token Japanese artist for this Character Soundtrack. THE QUOTA HAS BEEN MET ONCE AGAIN!

And last but not least, we have the modern stuff, which I’d ORIGINALLY intended to be a bunch of parodies. Obviously, the whole “80s song” thing has inspired a lot of silly parodies over the years, and originally I’d toyed with the idea of Hiro listening to several of them without realizing they were meant to be funny. There was some Ninja Sex Party in consideration, some Limozeen, that kind of stuff. But let’s be real, completely serious and real 80s cheese will ALWAYS be funnier than the stuff that’s trying to be funny on purpose. Thus, more and more vintage songs squeezed out the comedy ones, until the only remaining modern tracks were completely straight-faced revivalist songs. We’ve got two more instrumentals, “37 Million Horsepower” by Dynatron and “Breakpoint” by Garth Knight, both prime examples of the whole modern Synthwave thing. To be honest, I’ve always been a bit iffy about a lot of these songs. Like so many retro/revivalist movements, they wrap themselves up in so many clichés of the era they seek to emulate that they don’t actually sound as much like vintage songs as they think they do. Both the songs I mentioned just now are way too loud and forceful to coexist with the Jan Hammer or Harold Faltermeyer soundtracks they claim to be inspired by. And yet, I didn’t try to include any Jan Hammer or Harold Faltermeyer in Hiro’s soundtrack, because they’d be overpowered by all the Europe and Def Leppard found elsewhere. That’s what I mean, these Synthwave acts combine the various clichés into a hybrid form that didn’t actually exist back in the day. That’s not necessarily BAD, but it just rubs me the wrong way a supposed revival gets so revisionist. Not that Hiro would care, I’m sure he LOVES songs with all the sheer of Synth Pop het all the punch of Arena Rock. All the better to have a sweaty montage to! (Also, wow! I managed to get all music critic about something after all!)

The closest thing to a “parody” song that made it onto the soundtrack is the theme to Kung Fury: “True Survivor.” Written by another Synthwave pioneer, Mitch Murder, but the main attraction is obviously vocalist David Hasselhoff. Now, you’d think The Knight Rider Guy doing a song for goofy parody of 80s movies would itself be a goofy parody, like that Guardians of the Galaxy song he did. But no, “True Survivor” really plays it straight. Murder’s backing track is every bit as straightforward as the previous two songs, and if the lyrics are corny, it’s no more so than anything Stan Bush ever sung completely in earnest. And speaking of singing, The Hoff performs “True Survivor” with tongue completely out of cheek, treating it with exactly the same level of seriousness as any of those songs that got so big in Germany back in the day. And, of course, the fact that everyone is taking this one hundred percent seriously makes “True Survivor” a MILLION percent funnier than anything in Kung Fury.

On the subject of completely serious things being the most funny, we’ve got one more song I just HAD to save for last: Ty Parr’s “National Aerobics Championship Theme.” Yes, that song from that one viral video of all the smiling people in spandex looking completely ridiculous, the one that people loved to play over footage of video game characters glitching out, THAT song. It’s more of a joke than any joke song anyone could ever have recorded, but everything about it was completely legit when it was recorded. It’s only decades later that anybody rediscovered it and turned it into a gag. And more than anything else, Hiro totally wouldn’t get it. He’d just try to do the aerobic routines himself, fall on his face, then start right over again, completely oblivious. And think it’s SOOO cool.

Anyway, before the parenthetical notes that I KNOW nobody reads, I just want to point out that the Character Soundtracks will take a bit of a break next month. Me being me, I’ve got a WAVE of holiday content to unload on everybody, so most regular updates will stop while I focus on that. There WILL be more starting in January, though. Oh, you have NO idea how much more I’ve got waiting to be unleashed…

(Alright, NOW onto the stuff only I care about. Since Hiro’s soundtrack is so full of 80s songs, and from movies at that, I of course wanted to find as many original videos as possible. You know, as opposed to still photos of an album cover or something like that. This actually went a lot better than I’d dared hope, because apparently ALL Vevo videos are just available everywhere now. I’d seen a few be surprisingly unblocked, but I could have sworn that the majority of them still had the same region blocking as YouTube Music. So much so that I went ahead and tripled checked the videos statuses on other Region Block Checker sites, just in case the one I normally use was gitching out. But nope! They all seem to be clear worldwide. Only one of the sites I used had ANY regions blocked, and they were pretty random. So, sorry if you’re from Somaliland or Kosovo and can’t see Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out,” but I’m fairly sure everybody else can. I should also apologize for the glitches on the Vevo version of Aldo Nova’s “Fantasy.” Even though it’s totally official, and the ONLY posting I could find of the official video, it’s got a lot of weird visual distortions in the first minute or so, like it was ripped from a scuffed up laserdisc or something. I COULD have used a fan posting of just the song… but the sight of Aldo in a leopard-print jumpsuit, surrounded by uzi-wielding body guards, using his laser-shooting guitar to blow open a locked door DEMANDS to be seen even if it is glitchy. And speaking of demanding to be seen, I made a bit of a weird choice for a posting of Garth Knight’s “Breakpoint.” While there WERE videos of just the song out there, I went with a fan edit that puts it over the climactic final gun fight from Hard Boiled. It’s not the best representation of the song itself, since it actually stops once or twice for dialog from the film… with comedic new subtitles. But come on, it’s the hospital fight from Hard Boiled! One of the greatest action sequences ever filmed! How could I NOT use it? The one truly frustrating song out of the whole bunch was, of course, the one Japanese song: “Chase” by T-Square. Not only is this video blocked in Japan and ONLY Japan, but the version I have on the playlist actually isn’t the one on the iTunes playlist I have at home. I used the original recording of “Chase” from 1981’s Magic album, but the only posting of the song I could find on YouTube –or at least the side of YouTube I can access from OUTSIDE Japan– is a re-recording from 2001’s Truth 21c. There’s an argument to be made that the more modern recording rocks a little harder than the more synth-y ‘80s recording, and thus fits in with the rock songs better, but it still annoys me. Why you gotta be like that, Japan?)

Hiro's YouTube Playlist