"Subjectively, you can find something to love about any soundtrack, and music especially falls into that category of being something that anyone can love if they try hard enough, but certain creative decisions in the past have had more than a few holes in them. And some of those holes hurt to listen to, so I don't feel bad about hating it."
Film
- While for the most part, Aquaman (2018) was one of 2018's most anticipated blockbusters, Pitbull and Rhea's official song for it, "Ocean to Ocean"
, was not one of the most anticipated parts about it, putting it mildly. The song is a major disaster that attempts to sample Toto's iconic song "Africa" and does so in a way that's extremely haphazard - the beat and Pitbull's rapping sound as if they're two independent songs of each other altogether, and Rhea's guest spot, which shows her oversinging the chorus of "Africa" to painful degree only helps to make the experience even more painful. Within a day of its release it got tons of slamming from critics and people online, rivaling "YouTube Rewind 2018" as one of the most disliked videos on the site not even 24 hours after its release. - The "score" to the So Bad, It's Good slasher flick Don't Go in the Woods was evidently supposed to sound creepy and atonal, but the composer seemingly had no idea how to mix it properly. The results sound like a bunch of random electronic noises horribly mushed together, and it gets quite grating really quickly. Considering that the same composer also did the infamously awkward (albeit catchy) Captain Novolin soundtrack, this is not at all surprising. The sole bright spot may as well be the credits song, with its goofy lyrics sung to the tune of "The Teddy Bear's Picnic".
- The Faculty featured a cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" by the supergroup Class of '99, with Tom Morello on lead guitar, Stephen Perkins on drums, Martyn LeNoble of Porno for Pyros on bass, and Layne Staley on vocals. A supergroup with members of some of the biggest Alternative Rock and metal bands of The '90s covering Pink Floyd's famous anti-authority anthem sounds like a great idea...
Except Staley's vocals are absolutely, dreadfully bad. Staley, deep in the throes of drug addiction, with health problems and missing teeth, lazily slurs his way through the song and sounds almost completely monotone, like he's bored and has no idea what he's doing there. Even the famous line "HEY! TEACHERS! LEAVE THESE KIDS ALONE!" is fairly quiet here. It's a tragic monument to the downward spiral that Staley had fallen into by then: this was the last song he ever recorded before his death from a drug overdose four years later. Notice that while the other band members all filmed their appearances specifically for the video, the shots of Staley were all taken from archival footage of Mad Season's Live at the Moore concert in 1995. To show how the vocals affected this track, the soundtrack also features an instrumental cover of Parts 1 and 2 of "Another Brick in the Wall". While overly long, there's nothing wrong with the performance, which is a pretty solid and moody alt-rock rendition. Then the video there changes to the full version around the five-minute mark... - Monster a-Go Go already has an entry in the film category, but the score they gave it is just the icing on the cake. To elaborate, it consists mainly of sparse, jangly Scare Chords played on a Fender Rhodes electric piano and amplified to distortion; it's atonal, harsh, and probably meant to be creepy, but it just gets annoying after a while. And as if that weren't bad enough, the film's theme song suffers from bizarre, repetitive lyrics, and is recorded in such poor quality that it's often hard to make out what said lyrics even are. The composer/musician responsible is not listed in the credits, perhaps out of shame.
- The English dub of Dingo Pictures' Wabuu (the standalone DVD version, not the excerpt that's part of the PlayStation 2 multimedia disc The Countryside Bears), apart from Wabuu's theme song at the beginning and end, has an irritating Creepy Circus Music loop throughout throughout the film on top of the normal music tracks heard in the original German version and other dubs. In one scene it plays on top of itself, and out of sync to boot. Wabuu's theme itself is little better, having the English lyrics played on top of the German ones.
Live-Action TV
- The soundtrack to the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade. Gone were the beautiful orchestral renditions by Christopher Franke, instead replaced by a series of repetitive and annoying tracks with any sense of harmony or melody sounding like someone hitting random notes on a keyboard until something resembling music came out. Any and all attempts at sounding exotic and otherworldly fall flat and instead serve as a test of patience. The soundtrack would be more at home with the low-rate video games made in the '90s than a spinoff to one of the most popular sci-fi TV shows in recent history. And if you think the music sounds better when heard within the context of the show, it doesn't. You can listen to it in its entirety here.
- When Netflix bought the rights to stream the American version of Queer as Folk, Showtime had already lost the rights to the majority of the soundtrack, which resulted in Netflix having to replace them with either mockbuster versions of the songs or different songs altogether, to an extremely mixed effect. A good deal were So Okay, It's Average at worst and a few instances had fans even claiming Netflix's replacement was even better than the original, but a great number of them were downright irredeemable. A few examples include (but are not limited to):
- The Dyke Nite scene in 1x16, where Geri Halliwell's cover of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" was replaced with an absolutely pathetic mockbuster tune with a singer completely off-singing the line "You got caught red-handed/reaching into someone else's little cookie jar". Pain ensued.
- The gay pride dance scene in Season 2, which even defenders of Netflix can't defend.
- 3x12 originally had Muse's cover of "Feeling Good". In its place came an absolutely pathetic knockoff with the same riffs and some guy trying and failing hilariously to sound like Matt Bellamy while whining some angsty lyrics.
Video Games
- 720°:
- The title screen music of the NES version is a complete butchery of a much cooler tune from the original arcade version. The other tracks from the game (all three of them) are pretty poor in their own right, but at least they don't sound as horribly off-key as the title theme.
- The Commodore 64 soundtrack is even worse, with the only tune being an ear-grating rendition of the Downhill stage theme from the arcade and NES versions, which gets interrupted when sound effects play.
- The title screen music
- Action 52 has several bad tunes. "Crazy Shuf(f)le" is one of the most prominent, but the other notable ones are "And They Came/Beeps N' Blips" and "Operation Moon".
- As a result of one of the game's many glitches, the music in the third level of "Lollipops" is straight-up Nightmare Fuel. Supposedly it was meant to the play the music from the first level, but it somehow turned it into this. It even changes if you move around and do stuff (results can also vary depending on your emulator). One of the comments said that it sounded like Giygas raping an Atari 2600, while another likened it to the Anti-Life Equation.
YouTube Commenter: The best music, in my opinion, gives you this wonderful soaring feeling in your chest. This, however, manages to provoke the exact opposite effect. I now feel as if I have no soul. This music has made me feel like a simple meat-bag stuffed haphazardly with organs, incapable of turning off the horrid un-sound being pumped into his ears. - As a result of one of the game's many glitches, the music in the third level of "Lollipops"
- The entire soundtrack from the NES version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is absolutely horrendous. All the songs are poorly looped, have terrible instrument usage and are arranged very poorly. Considering how short they are and the length of the stages, it will wear on you really quickly.
- The music from the second level deserves a special mention. The link above is what the song is supposed to sound like normally. In the actual game, the sound effects for the "Goof Bombs" were accidentally coded to interfere with the sound channels, making an already-terrible song even worse.
The Angry Video Game Nerd: Oh my God! I didn't know the NES was capable of producing such an ear-piercing sound! That's awful! - The music from the second level deserves a special mention. The link above is what the song is supposed to sound like normally. In the actual game, the sound effects for the "Goof Bombs" were accidentally coded to interfere with the sound channels, making an already-terrible song even worse
- The DOS adaptation of All Dogs Go to Heaven stays mostly silent, which is a good thing because the sound is loud and heavily distorted. The developers attempted to rip the movie's soundtrack and adapt it for the PC Speaker, and ended up with a result worse than had they just made music for the sound engine (which in itself can only play screechy 8-bit noises). The audio as-is wouldn't be out of place in a more obnoxious YouTube Poop. Joel from Vinesauce witnessed the torture from the sound on this game here, stating that if all dogs go to Heaven, he just went to Hell from this experience.
- The Genesis version of Incredible Technologies' Licensed Game of American Gladiators, which sucked across all platforms for numerous other reasons, goes the Hong Kong '97 route by playing a single music track nonstop throughout, which happens to be an ear-bleeding FM-synth butchery of the formerly-passable intro theme of the SNES version.
- The title music for the ZX Spectrum game Automania is probably one of the most cacophonous video game soundtracks ever made. Listen to it here (by the way, that's the 128K version; in the 48K version, only the tune you hear in the title screen is played, incessantly, for the entire game).
- Back to the Future (1989) has, as its only BGM (aside from the "Johnny B. Goode" music minigame mentioned below), a cheap 8-bit rendition of Huey Lewis and the News's "The Power of Love" sped up to near-unrecognizability. Like Hong Kong '97, it plays uninterrupted throughout the game, with the exception of the minigames. Word of God says that the developer's sound engine only supported playing music back at 150bpm, which nobody bothered telling the composer until he had already arranged it at the correct, slower tempo, and there was no time to redo it; the same thing happened to the game's rendition of "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, but it's nowhere near as grating because it plays for only one minigame. Here's how it apparently was supposed to sound.
- The sole song of Balloon Shoot, a Nice Code Software game found on several plug 'n play Famiclone systems, sounds like a horribly corrupted knockoff of the Balloon Fight theme.
- Bebe's Kids for SNES is already an infamously awful game with terrible music, but the final boss theme is the icing of shit. The same annoying words are repeated constantly to a horrible hip-hop beat; it is played during an already crappy boss; and worst of all, good luck trying to get it out of your head.
- The early arcade game Blasto (not to be confused with the PlayStation mascot platformer) has an utter ear rape fest of a soundtrack that makes CrazyBus sound calming in comparison. One YouTube member, paraphrasing The Tourettes Guy, commented that it "sounds like R2-D2 taking a shit".
- A Castlevania fan game called Castle Quest has some pretty good music for the most part, with the exception of the song played in the final stage. Said song is quite literally the most repetitive theme since Hong Kong '97, with the song lasting just two seconds before it loops. Listen to it here.
- The original recording of "Subhuman" intended for Devil May Cry 5, featuring Eddie Hermida of Suicide Silence, which was fresh off a reviled Self-Titled Album, was universally hated by fans due to the terrible lyrics that consist of nothing but hamfisted screams, horrendous volume mixing that makes the lines drown out the instrumentals, and being simply completely unfitting for a suave badass like Dante. When it was announced that the song was being redone in wake of the singer having engaged in an abusive relationship with an underage fan, the reaction was little more than relief. It’s not a good sign when people are listening to the song for the first time and laughing at how bad it is.
- From Dian Shi Ma Li (Mario Lottery) - PUSH START TO RICH.
- The music for the Sega 32X port of Doom is what happens when you try to do too little with too little. The 32X doesn't have the same breadth of sound samples as the PC does, so several of the instruments used in the original songs (electric guitars, strings, woodblocks) are given wildly inappropriate sounds (if they weren't simply omitted outright, as different instruments fight for space on the 32X's limited channels). The drum samples are so weak as to be inaudible under the cacophony of the other instruments, making the faster metal songs sound like a rhythm-less mess. None of the songs from the soundtrack are safe, but particular mention goes to the unforgivable treatment they gave to the iconic music from E1M1, with the raw electric guitar sounds of the original tune completely butchered into what sounds like fart sounds rendered on a Yamaha DX7. Here's the original MS-DOS version... and here's the 32X version of that same song.. As the 32X version was rushed to be a launch title for the Sega Mega Drive expansion, it's likely there wasn't enough time to properly port the music over from the MIDI-derived MUS format used by the game to Sega's hardware.
- Strangely enough, prototype versions of the 32X port had a version of E1M1 that, while sounding fairly flat and dull, wasn't anywhere near as grating as the one used in the finished version.
- E1M8 also deserves special mention. The song's leading melody is heavily reliant on pitch-bends to give it an eerie, foreboding feeling; however, every pitch bend in the 32X version goes one pitch too far, making the melody swing in and out of key with the rest of the song. Here's the dread-inspiring original... and here's the nausea-inducing 32X version.
- Strangely enough, prototype versions of the 32X port had a version of E1M1
- The soundtrack from the horrible webgame Dontrel Dolphin in its entirety just defies description, other than possibly saying it sounds like the work of someone on a combination of acid and crack trying to play a horror movie score while wearing oven mitts. Listen to the title theme in all its... glory, and if that isn't enough for you, this full playthrough shows off the rest of the game's soundtrack.
- The Genesis port of Double Dragon 1 has perhaps the worst rendition of the soundtrack short of the Atari 2600 version, as shown by Game Sack in their Worst Sounding Genesis Games video.
- Farmyard Fun for the Atari 2600. Poor ears of listener.
- In Friday the 13th for the NES, one of LJN Toys' most infamous turds, the main BGM consists of just two bars alternating in a four-second loop, which the player unfortunately has to put up with when listening for the Jason Alarm.
- Mythicon produced some terrible games for the Atari 2600. The music is definitely no exception:
- Fire Fly tries to mimic the sound of the titular bug flying around during gameplay, but due to the limitations of the 2600 and Mythicon's sheer incompetence, they made it sound like a drunk synthesizer on the toilet.
- Sorcerer is probably one of the first games to use Variable Mix. Unfortunately, the result is this really annoying whistle-like tune that is accompanied by an awful buzzing noise whenever you encounter an enemy.
- Star Fox (no relation to the famous Nintendo game) doesn't have music, but it constantly barrages you with its obnoxious sound effects.
- Fire Fly tries to mimic the sound of the titular bug flying around during gameplay, but due to the limitations of the 2600 and Mythicon's sheer incompetence, they made it sound like a drunk synthesizer on the toilet.
- The GB Hunter (aka Datel Game Booster, its original European name), an unlicensed Game Boy emulator for the Nintendo 64, is rather unique in an unfortunate way: In lieu of Game Boy audio, which it can't emulate, the device plays an utterly awful, distorted, off-key racket masquerading as music... specifically, masquerading as a portion of "That's The Way It Is" by Jeroen Tel, which sounds infinitely better than what the GB Hunter screeches through the N64's line out pins. Even worse, as (possibly unknowingly) demonstrated in the linked video, it doesn't necessarily fit with what's happening on the screen - since the music is generated by the GB Hunter itself, it just plays independently of what's happening, Hong Kong '97-style. Needless to say, when looking at third-party Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player alternatives, The Gaming Historian cited the terrible music as reason alone to avoid the GB Hunter at all costs, even before looking at the other problems with the system. Thankfully, Datel removed the music for the Super GB Booster, the PlayStation equivalent, and instead allowed owners to use audio CDs.
- Hoshi wo Miru Hito (Stargazers) may be Japan's equivalent of Action 52, but its soundtrack wasn't one of the few redeeming qualities. All the songs consist of high-pitched notes and are arranged beyond abysmal level. As a result, the town and battle themes almost sound like something out of a fever dream, and the rest of the songs are absolutely ear-splitting. This video (which demonstrates Stargazers' mind-blowing flaws) shows off some of the music. Apparently, the composer was Naoki Morishima, who wrote the music for the Famicom exclusive The Black Bass and its sequel, as seen below and who programmed all of the games he created.
- While the Red Chinese children's anthem "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" is not horrible, Hong Kong '97 infamously uses a 5-second loop of it as the only song - in fact, the only audio - in the entire game. Worse, the loop runs independently of what's going on in the game, meaning it never stops even when you die. Unlike other examples on the page, it was blatantly stolen from another source rather than made from scratch. If you're curious about the original version that the game ripped from, it's here.
- The pathetic Suspiciously Similar Song version of the "Raiders March" in the NES version of Hydlide. It actually first appeared in the otherwise Japan-only Hydlide II, and is unfortunately indicative of the quality of music on the PC-88 before later models gave it a sound chip and improved games' soundtracks by leaps and bounds. Here's the two tracks of these songs from the NES port.
- Sachen's (Color Dreams to be exact) soundtracks are generally as shoddy as the games themselves, but Silent Assault's music is horrible even by their standards. The sole BGM track consists of a monophonic sine wave melody accompanied by white noise military drums.
- The Super Mario World Game Mod Hammer Bro Demo 3 (which is horrible in its own right) has some of this whenever the creator ported music from other games himself. Take the brilliant music from the Mega Man (Classic) series, make it sound like a cat being tortured and someone banging the keys in succession, and you've got some of the "songs" used in this game. If you like the original music, hearing them in this will probably break you. Just compare them here. It's absolutely appalling how bad these renditions are (they're the first ones shown in the comparisons).
- The music from said hack can stoop even lower than this. One of the songs (which is supposed to be the peaceful Cascade Capers theme from Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!) did not utilize the correct samples, making the music pure ear rape, and even managed to change the pitch of the sound effects into the level.
- The music from said hack can stoop even lower than this. One of the songs (which is supposed to be the peaceful Cascade Capers theme from Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!) did not utilize the correct samples, making the music pure ear rape
- For the most part, Kingdom Hearts II has an excellent soundtrack. Swim This Way, however, is exceedingly inane and vapid. The song puts the direct-to-video Disney sequels to shame in terms of how terrible it is, with its terrible singing, obnoxiously catchy and childish tune, and such wonderful lyrical content as "finny fun". It's obnoxious as-is as a rhythm game section in an action-RPG, but it can't even be listened to on its own due to the lyrics having too much to do with the rhythm gameplay. This song, as well as the abformentioned gameplay changes, has made Atlantica The Scrappy among many players.
- Marble Madness:
- The soundtrack became nearly unlistenable in its North American Genesis port, thanks to infamous sound designer Steve Hayes. By contrast, the soundtrack of the Japanese Mega Drive port by Tengen was mostly faithful to the arcade game.
- In the NES port, which has an otherwise decent soundtrack, the music for Level 3, much like the aforementioned 720° title theme, ended up being mutilated in the process of transcribing the arcade instruments to the NES sound chip.
- The soundtrack
- Too many themes from educational Mario games fall straight into this. Seriously, listen to the music from Mario Teaches Typing (with extremely annoying typing sounds) or Mario's Early Years. It's torture on the ears.
- The music in Mario Teaches Typing can get much worse. The link above is what you get if you had a compatible sound card. If your sound card wasn't compatible with the game, however, then it would play the music and sound effects through the PC Speaker, creating sounds that ScrewAttack.com likened to "a retarded R2-D2."
- The music in Mario Teaches Typing can get much worse. The link above is what you get if you had a compatible sound card. If your sound card wasn't compatible with the game
- Mega Man II for the Game Boy is already infamous on its own, mostly thanks to the grating, excessively high-pitched arrangements that manage to kill perfectly good compositions like Air Man's theme - and SiIvaGunner improved on that by rearranging it in the style of the NES games.
- The NES port of 1942 has an extremely beepy and irritating rendition of the ''March of Midway'' that plays throughout every single stage.
- The overworld theme of the Famicom game Onyanko Town is Sensory Abuse at its finest, with it being a completely whacked-out arrangement of "Ballet of the Chicks In Their Shells" from Pictures at an Exhibition, which loops every 5 seconds.
- R-Type III for the GBA is pure Porting Disaster on all fronts, and that includes the BGM. Most SNES games that were ported to the GBA tend to have botched music because of the different sound chips between the two systems, but in this situation the developers lost the original source code and they redid it from scratch. Shockingly, how they butchered the recreated music (with the GBA soundchip in mind) has to be heard to be believed. Here's the original Force Select music, and here's the GBA version. It gets worse if you compare the theme for the first stage: SNES and GBA. Hell, compare it to the C64 version from R-Type, which was made in 1988.
- While the NES version of Rygar is well-known for its distinctly atmospheric soundtrack, the Palace of Dorago BGM stands out (in a bad way) for being nothing but a four-note loop. Considering how disproportionately short it is to the length of the dungeon its featured in, it gets repetitive very quickly. Contrast this with the more developed, sophisticated melody of the Famicom version, which captures the mood of dread the NES version was trying to achieve, and better fits the style of Rygar's soundtrack.
- Sega Smash Pack Volume 1, on the Sega Dreamcast, suffers from a horribly butchered soundtrack; the included Mega Drive games sound like a Master System at best and an Atari 2600 at worst, while Sonic the Hedgehog sounds worse than in its already bad Game Boy Advance port. While the compilation was patchy to begin with, the soundtrack alone yielded a 4 out of 10 from Gamespot.
- Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijou Yuukai Jiken took the music to the extreme by trying to make it as high-pitched as possible, making it painful.
- Snoopy for the Commodore 64 has some pretty bad music even for 1984, when it was first released. It contains nothing but the first couple of bars of "The Entertainer" played on only one channel of the SID sound chip, looped a couple of times in different waveforms. Even if the developers couldn't afford the rights to any of Vince Guaraldi's memorable tunes from the cartoons, they could have at least put more effort into making this public domain tune sound a little less plain, as games from a year earlier such as Pogo Joe and Hover Bovver could do a lot better.
- If there's one place where it's evident that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was an Obvious Beta, it's the music. The battle themes are the only original tracks, and sound alright-ish, if badly-compressed and converted, but everything else is MIDI versions of tracks from earlier games. Check out the Genesis original, then the version from 2008.
- Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis for GBA was a rushed-out-the-door Porting Disaster in all respects. This includes the BGM. Rather than try to synthesize it from scratch, they threw in MIDI files of the original melodies, with ear-grating, tinny samples which are incredibly low-fidelity, even by GBA standards.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog Game Mod Hyper X is notable for being one of the first Sonic hacks to have its entire soundtrack revamped. However, this isn't always a good thing, as all of the new songs sound like they're either missing audio channels, using inappropriate instruments, or are simply off-key.
- The intro theme to the Japan-only game The Black Bass for the Famicom note has to heard to be believed. One of the lead channels sounds corrupted to the point where it's grating.
- The Great Waldo Search for the NES may be an improvement over its predecessor, Where's Waldo?, but its background music is atrocious. Where's Waldo?, as terrible as it was in its own right, at least had the benefit of having Julian LeFay as its composer.
- The SNES version doesn't fare much better. Aside from a terrible rendition of the Where's Waldo? theme song - the NES version by contrast had a digitized version of the theme, a rarity for an 8-bit console - the soundtrack features a grand total of four songs. The ones used for the first, second, and fourth levels are mediocre, but the one featured in the third level is borderline unlistenable thanks to some horrendous instrumentation.
- The SNES version
- The 16-bit console ports of Wayne's World, as the AVGN put it, has the "all-time worst butchering of Bohemian Rhapsody". The Genesis version is leaning towards this as that rendition is trying its hardest to not sound like a depressed organ. The SNES version, while still terrible, is more So Bad, It's Good as it sounds like someone is spamming the accordion.
- An example that likely would've gone unheard of in this day and age had it not been for The Angry Video Game Nerd, the Speed Skating "music" from the NES port of Winter Games. For reference, this is the same bit of music from the original Amiga version; certainly nothing very impressive, but it at least sounds like music, rather than an audio chip having a nervous breakdown.
- Wizards and Warriors III - "Thief's Guild", which is even written by David Wise of all people. The track starts out fine but, 50 seconds in, devolves into random notes. It's pretty jarring, considering how good the rest of the game's soundtrack is.
- Generally, playing any old MS-DOS game without a soundcard would lead to this, since the computer would try and play both the soundtrack and sound effects with seemingly random beeps. The above entry for Mario Teaches Typing is one good example of this, but the Castlevania port was even worse for it. The original soundtrack is basically impossible to make out with all the beeping instead of actual instruments.
Anime Theme Songs
- While it is debatable which version of "Dragon Soul" is better (between Sean Schemmel and Vic Mignogna, and sometimes Takayoshi Tanimoto), hardly anyone would argue that they're at least better than the version sung by Justin Cook. He's a brilliant voice actor but a mediocre singer, and seems to be doing a bad impersonation of Jakob Dylan.
- The opening theme song for Master of Martial Hearts was clearly sung by someone who can't sing for the life of her. She sounds like a really bored person trying to sing a fast-paced song. And that long note she holds near the end is a huge Brown Note. If your ears can take it, here's a link for it here.
- If you can Believe It, the German theme (which is sung with English lyrics) to Naruto may be even worse than the examples listed already, if not the worst anime theme, period. It starts promising with the Third Hokage narrating about the Nine-Tail Fox's attack, before turning into a bad rap song. The vocals are off-key, the main singer sounds drunk and bored, and the lyrics are incoherent with a use of bad rhymes. They tried rhyming "cool" (to describe Sasuke) with "beautiful" (to describe Sakura). However The full version of the song has been better received.
Web Original
- Rob Scallon is perhaps one of the most talented musicians on YouTube, and he and The Nostalgia Critic have a history together as collaborators. A history utterly tainted by Nostalgia Critic's The Wall, the score of the namesake video and a so-called Affectionate Parody of the original. It's pretty obvious who had the reins; Rob's talent is wasted on arrangements so flat they sound like generic MIDIs, and Doug's scenery-chewing, overexerted vocals miss the mark way more often than they hit, no small thanks to a garbled mix. The lyrics consist of shallow jabs at the album, the film, and the audience, with no care to understand either ("We Need More Victimization" mocks the original for pandering to schoolkids, ignoring its background or even the way English schools worked, and "So Long, Weird Song" calls the original "Oscar Bait"—the album came first, by three years) out-of-place, forced attempts at Walker's usual humor (such as Corey Taylor's closing performance of the SpongeBob SquarePants theme, the Bait-and-Switch punchline of a Better Than a Bare Bulb skit) or, in the case of "In the Floyd (Again?)," Author Tracts against his website's growing list of detractors. The closest to a silver lining is "Fennah's The Trial," simply because Doug was uninvolved. The album was on Scallon's Bandcamp for only a couple of days. SputnikMusic rates it 1.0, and Albumoftheyear.org puts it at 7 points out of 100, based on 78 reviews. That's not even counting what other online reviewers thought of it. The album shot its way down Rate Your Music's Bottom 100 album charts, where it sat at #1 for weeks.
Western Animation
- The theme song for The Brothers Flub is speculated to be at least a contributing factor to the cartoon's failure, if not the reason, simply because the vocals are awful. They feature the shrillest tenor imaginable singing nothing in particular, as counterpoint to a Simpleton Voiced baritone chanting "flub", plus the odd random noise here and there. The instrumental version played over the end credits is perfectly fine, so it's another example of how vocals can ruin a song. RebelTaxi and The Mysterious Mr. Enter have both included it high in their respective lists of worst cartoon theme songs.
- The 1970s De Patie Freleng Enterprises theatrical short series The Dogfather is generally regarded as just being average and unmemorable — once you look past the number of Recycled Scripts it features from Friz Freleng's previous works — but the theme tune is just horrendous. For all his skill as a voice actor, leading man Bob Holt never had a reputation for his singing chops, and his awkward Marlon Brando impression (to say nothing of such clunky lines as "I'll sign a contract/That's an offer you can't refuse") didn't improve things any. Even worse is the original version, in which he spoke the lines instead; all the while, he sounds either drunk or half-asleep.
- The 1968 Looney Tunes short See Ya Later, Gladiator, already regarded as arguably the worst Looney Tunes cartoon ever made, opens with a harsh off-key version of the already oddball re-arrangement that was done to the theme in 1964. It's almost like the composer saw how poor the cartoon was, and discreetly tried to warn audiences not to watch it.
- The Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa is already considered one of the worst pieces of animation in history, but it can at least boast that it has a solid cast and even features singing from Paige O' Hara and Jodi Benson (Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Ariel from The Little Mermaid respectively). However, an early version of Benson's song exists in a demo reel that was originally performed by none other than Nancy Cartwright, best known of course for her role as Bart Simpson. However, in this performance she proves why she should just stick to voice acting as her singing here is simply awful. She sounds like a toddler who's trying desperately not to run out of breath as she attempts to sing but instead just sounds like she's yelling the lyrics along with the music and the backing vocals aren't helping as the horrible reverb effect used on them makes them sound like a bunch of ghosts moaning in a haunted house. The song was split into two parts in the demo, find them here and here.
