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There are subjectives, and then there are these. While you may believe a work fits here, and you might be right, people tend to have rather vocal, differing opinions about this subject.
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Horrible / Music Soundtracks

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"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."
—Rabbid Luigi, Top Five Worst Soundtracks in Video Games

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    Anime 
  • While it is debatable which version of "Dragon Soul" is better (between Sean Schemmel and Vic Mignogna, and sometimes Takayoshi Tanimoto), practically everyone 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.
  • "Ghost Busterz" by ULTRA BRAiNnote , the theme for Musashi Gundoh, is truly awful. With an annoying beeping theme (seemingly made by a cheap keyboard), poorly written (if they were even written at all) and meandering Word Salad Lyrics—seriously, the most coherent and understandable line is "WE'RE GHOST-A BUSTERZ OH OH OH"—that wouldn't be relevant to the show even if they did make sense, and horrible singing that serves only to exacerbate the lyrics' incoherence, it's just as incompetent as the animation of the show. One commenter "complimented" the show for the innovation of using something other than music as its theme, and a couple of others theorized that the song was the result of a mental breakdown that involved the artist recording himself abusing his instruments while incoherently shouting random nonsense.
  • 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... which, considering the fact "Ghost Busterz" precedes this, should terrify you. 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.

    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 interpolates Toto's iconic song "Africa"note  in an extremely haphazard way: the beat and Pitbull's rapping sound as if they're two independent songs of each other altogether, and Rhea's guest spot, where she oversings the chorus of "Africa", 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. In the context of the movie itself, the song is used as Arthur and Mera arrive in Africa (the Sahara desert, to be exact). Adam Johnston pointed out in his review that using the original song would have worked just fine.
  • 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...
  • Highlander: The Source notoriously features a cover version of Queen's "Princes of the Universe" for a montage sequence near the start of the third act. To say the least, it isn't a good cover, with both the vocals and instrumentals coming across as incredibly half-hearted compared to the Queen original. However, it's still a masterpiece compared to the cover of another Queen song, "Who Wants to Live Forever?", which plays over the movie's end credits. This version can only be described as an attempt to re-imagine Queen through the lens of Country and Western, and ends up completely massacring the song. An oddly fitting way to end the movie that proved the Franchise Killer for Highlander.
  • Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is widely agreed to be the lowpoint of the Friday the 13th saga, and its score is no exception. The normally-competent Harry Manfredini was seemingly either having a bad day or was baked out of his mind while composing the score, as the end result, especially the main theme, sounds like someone hitting random notes on a synthesizer while in the throes of a grand mal seizure. It's possible he was aiming for the type of Scare Chord-laden atonality that characterized his work on the previous films, but if that was the case then he failed horribly. The sole bright spot is generally agreed to be the opening track that plays before and during the FBI scene due to it capturing the old-school charm of the series' previous installments, and even then it's not nearly enough to redeem this mess. While Manfredini would regain his brilliance in the following film Jason X, considered by many to feature some of his best work in the series, the music in Jason Goes to Hell is widely brought up by Friday the 13th fans as a disgrace.
  • 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 "Didgeridoo", 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.
  • Considering that Hawaii Five-O received multiple Emmy nominations for its music Fred Steiner's score for the final season's "The Bark and the Bite" is just inexcusable. The would-be comic nature of the episode is underlined by "The Doggie in the Window?" being repeatedly incorporated into the music. It makes an already hard-to-take episode pretty much an excruciating experience.
  • Power Rangers Dino Thunder is widely seen as one of the better Power Rangers series produced while under Disney's control in the mid-2000s. The same can't be said for its soundtrack, or rather, seeming lack of it. It seems the music budget was slashed to almost nothing as throughout the show, it's either the main theme (which is awesome in its own right, but when played ad nauseum during both small-scale and large-scale battles, it gets irritating quickly), a couple other tracks composed for the show, or most commonly, obvious stock music. These few pieces were used over and over again, and if you're watching the show on Netflix it'll drive you mad quickly. It was a far cry from the Saban era (where every series had brand-new music, though some pieces would be recycled on occasion and others would sound similar to music from earlier shows), or even predecessor Power Rangers Ninja Storm (which did use the stock music featured in this show, but still had a fair amount of new music composed for the show; the use of stock stuff was justified at first since Disney was giving the show a lower budget and they were only getting on their feet with the move of production from California to New Zealand). Thankfully, the shows after PRDT cut down on the stock music and theme overuse and by Power Rangers RPM (the last under Disney's ownership) the music was fresh and varied again.
  • WKRP in Cincinnati was one of only a few shows at the time to use popular music from several different artists and bands. While the show did have some of the music replaced in its first run in syndication, problems arose when the show went into syndication a second time. Now, most of the music had been replaced with some truly bad muzak.
    • “For Love or For Money: Part 1” had Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor Doctor)” replaced with a horribly slow song with a tempo that in no way matches the fast tempo of the original. The song also has lyrics of its own. Said lyrics are sung by a man who sounds slightly hungover and lacking in energy. They also sound strange and generic.
    • “Bailey’s Show” had “Jailhouse Rock” replaced with a terrible, speedy two-note song on a loop that didn’t compare to the popular Elvis hit.

    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.
  • Bebe's Kids for SNES is already an infamously awful game with terrible music, but the final boss theme is the icing on the cake of shit. The same annoying wordsnote  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," Dante's theme in Devil May Cry 5. Eddie Hermida of Suicide Silence sang lead, somehow doing even worse than on their last album. His delivery consisted of nothing but hamfisted screams, so loud in the mix as to drown out the entire instrumental. The end result flew in the face of everything about Dante's character. When they announced they would re-record it with a new vocalist (officially because Hermida was accused of severe sexual misconduct), the reaction was nothing short of 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.
  • 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 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.
  • Mythicon produced some terrible games for the Atari 2600. Their one attempt at music is definitely no exception: although Sorcerer is probably one of the first games to use Variable Mix, it unfortunately resulted in a really annoying whistle-like tune that is accompanied by an awful buzzing noise whenever you encounter an enemy.
  • 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.
  • For the most part, Kingdom Hearts II has an excellent soundtrack. "Swim This Way" from the much-maligned Atlantica level's rhythm minigame, 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 (the second half of the chorus, which is repeated countless times throughout the song, tries to cram 16 syllables of lyrics into 8 beats, which sounds awkward), obnoxiously catchy and childish tune (similar to a knockoff of "Under the Sea", which is baffling since the actual "Under the Sea" is also present in the same level), 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 hated among many players.
  • Many of the educational Mario games fall straight into this. Mario Is Missing and Mario's Time Machine had an OK soundtrack, but the others aren't so fortunate.
    • The music from Mario Teaches Typing (backed with extremely annoying typing sounds) and Mario's Early Years is torture on the ears due to the really bad samples being used. The CD-ROM re-release of Mario Teaches Typing didn't improve on the soundtrack, but it includes a rap song by Legacy X. It's really out of place for this sort of game, but of all the music from the edutainment Mario games listed here, it's the most listenable of them all, if not enjoyable in its own right.
    • It's possible to make the music from the PC version of those games to sound even worse. The result above is what you hear if your sound card is compatible with the game. If your sound card wasn't compatible with the game, it would then play the music and sound effects through the PC Speaker, creating sounds that ScrewAttack.com likened to "a retarded R2-D2."
    • The PC version of Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun featured a set of public-domain sing-along songs with the Mario characters acting out the scenes. This wouldn't be so bad if the kids singing them weren't so tone-deaf and out of sync with the instrumentals. The animations does not help into giving everything an oddly nightmarish quality akin to those poorly-animated videos of kids' songs littered throughout YouTube. Special mention goes to "The Wheels on the Bus" where the bus driver is none other than Weegee. Have a listen if you dare.
  • 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.
  • The Dual Shock version of Resident Evil features what sounds like somebody randomly banging the white keys on a cheap Casio (or midi controller) set to "horn." The first note tries to be atmospheric, but it's too awkward to be effective and the rest of the song immediately degenerates into total and utter stupidity.note  It's so awful that it's caused people to perceive the otherwise-alright replacement soundtrack it's part of to be much worse than it actually is. When it was revealed that credited composer Mamoru Samuragochi, believed to be the Japanese Beethoven as he claimed to be deaf, was a fraud whose so-called work, including this soundtrack, was largely ghostwritten, it predictably resulted in jokes that this particular song was the only one he had written himself.
  • 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.
  • San Francisco Rush's original arcade and N64 score was nothing to write home about, but the soundtrack to Climax Studio's PlayStation Porting Disaster was nothing short of atrocious. For example, the title theme is a short and tinny Drum and Bass loop with a repeating "Rush!" voice clip. And it continues to play during the lengthy loading screens. The race BGMs are barely better, being hideously lo-fi attempts at Big Beat or Industrial Metal with haphazard sprinklings of announcer voiceovers and crowd cheers from the arcade version. A particularly egregious example is the Track 2 theme, whose synth bass line sounds like a long electronic fart. Then there's "What's Your Name?", a butchered knockoff of the original name entry theme.
  • 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. Fans of the Video Game Music Archive might be thinking "So what? MIDI can still sound good!" Not when half the instruments are missing, it can't. Check out the original version of Sonic 3's final boss theme, then its painful remake for Chronicles.
  • 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 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 Amiga port; certainly nothing very impressive, but it at least sounds like music, rather than an audio chip having a nervous breakdown.
  • Wizards & 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.
  • One of the reasons why Zelda's Adventure is considered the worst of the The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games is its Loads and Loads of Loading, which forces the music to restart every time the screen scrolls. This issue reaches its worst in the Shrine of Illusion (video only plays music in the right-side headphone for some reason), due to its music being a mix of Creepy Circus Music and Ominous Pipe Organ that becomes extremely grating extremely fast. It's telling that despite each segment of music being only 18 seconds long, most of them qualify as Long Song, Short Scene (unless you get stuck trying to beat enemies without their designated weakness, which leads to the normal issues with short looping music). When Danny and Egoraptor played through that level, the video was full of them complaining about the music.

    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-arrangements that were done to the theme in 1963 and 1967. It's almost like the composer saw how poor the cartoon was, and discreetly tried to warn audiences not to watch it.
  • 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.
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Professional Wrestling

  • Despite having the looks and the talent to be a future top heel in WWE, Rob Conway never made it big... and his horrendous entrance music, which sounds nothing a wrestling theme, probably played a huge part in that. It's sung by someone who sounds like an off-key Randy Newman sick with a cold, and the lyrics about Conway's gimmick are about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. While the theme would have been fine in something like an off-Broadway musical or a Blue's Clues episode, it completely failed as a wrestler's entrance music; rather than getting fans excited for the wrestler about to come out, it instead bored them to death. You can watch Brian Zane call this the absolute worst theme in the history of wrestling here.
  • The 2001 opening to WCW Nitro honestly sounds like the music is glitching out as it's quite literally just noise with weird sound effects mixed in over a seizure inducing video. It's pretty much just another example of how dire the WCW product was by this point.

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