Ennio Morricone Pastiche

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A popular Stock Parody in the field of soundtracks. A scene depicting cowboys or just a character posing as a badass or facing a potential threat is accompanied by music similar to Ennio Morricone's score for the spaghetti Westerns by Sergio Leone. Usually the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is quoted ("ayiayiaaaay") or the harmonica theme from Once Upon a Time in the West.

Typical features include, but are not limited to:

• A strong focus on string instruments, especially the electric guitar.
• Similarly, brass, especially the trumpet.
• Whistling is practically a signature feature in any Morricone pastiche.
• Sound effects baked into the soundtrack, primarily ones that hail from westerns (ex. gunshots, a whipcrack, a rattlesnake's rattle, etc.)
• If characters are having a Showdown at High Noon, expect to hear church bells somewhere in the music.
• The beat typically has a galloping rhythm, akin to a horse's gallop.

Also popular whenever a parody of Clint Eastwood is shown.

Compare Showdown at High Noon.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This "Got Milk?" ad uses the actual Morricone music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• This 2013 advert for "Tampax Pearl" also uses a Morriconesque musical queue when Mother Nature faces a young woman in a stand-off.

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop: "Go Go Cactus Man!", the leitmotif of Cowboy Andy from the episode "Cowboy Funk", is a pretty blatant homage to the theme from For a Few Dollars More.
• Lupin III: "Tornado", a recurring theme of Daisuke Jigen, has a very Morricone feel to it. The character's concept was inspired by gangster and western flicks.

Film — Animation

• The duel between Mister Fox and Rat in Fantastic Mr. Fox features a theme strongly reminiscent of the track from For A Few Dollars More- complete with galloping pace and spring and whistle sounds.
• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa has the The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme in a "standoff" between Alex and the Nana — albeit instead of the gun showdown the song usually scores, it's a straight-up physical fight. To fit the faster pace of the scene, the music is sped up and set to a polka beat.
• In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: A Morricone-esque track plays as the cast stares each other down in a Mexican Standoff during the Final Battle.
• The whole soundtrack of Rango, given it's an Affectionate Parody of the Spaghetti Western. At a certain point, one of the owl mariachi chorus is seen playing the guitar from the soundtrack.

Film — Live-Action

• The opening of Delusions of Grandeur. Michel Polnareff's soundtrack is a deliberate homage to Morricone.
• Done in the film Hababam Sinifi (1975) where the iconic music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is used in the scene where the class members confront the bright guys chosen for the quiz.
• Done with a cowboy scene in the film Innerspace.
• In Inspector Gadget (1999), the GBU theme is used as Gadget and RoboGadget enter a "duel stance" on a bridge.
• In Kelly's Heroes Morricone-style music accompanies Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland (wearing WWII American army uniforms with side arms in holsters) as they walk side-by-side slowly along a dusty street in a deserted village towards a German Tiger tank that is rotating its turret.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Morricone-style music (titled "Parley") is heard when Will, Jack and Norrington face their opponents on a deserted island.
• The Quick and the Dead: Mimicks Morricone music.
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights: The Clint Eastwood caricature type villain is accompanied by Morriconesque music.
• Stay Tuned: Also imitated.

Live-Action TV

• The A-Team: Murdock once dressed up as a cowboy, while Morricone style music was playing.
• Used in an episode of Bassie & Adriaan: "Het Geheim van de Sleutel", when they are visiting Spain.
• The Doctor Who Series 9 episode "Hell Bent" has the Twelfth Doctor returning to Gallifrey, in order to settle some old scores. Not only do several scenes invoke Spaghetti Western tropes, but Murray Gold's score for the ep includes a new arrangement of "The Doctor's Theme" (used originally for the Ninth Doctor). Said new arrangement has "Morricone" written all over it.
• The theme song for the Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian is a homage to the style, with some Space Western vibes sprinkled on top. Have a listen.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: Whistled by the show's hosts while watching "Gamera Vs. Barugon", "The Crawling Hand", "The Crawling Eye", "The Atomic Brain", "Village Of The Giants", "12ToMoon", "Last Of The Wild Horses", "It Conquered The World", "Overdrawn At The Memory Bank" and "The Sidehackers".

Music

• Broken Bells' "Mongrel Heart" contains a very Morricone-like midsection. The band themselves admitted they went a bit over-the-top with it, but said it would have been a shame to leave it on the cutting room floor:

  "It's not like we're trying to hide that it's this Morricone feel to it. I would hate to have not had it on there and then been, like, oh, but you've got to hear the version that had the horn on it. It was just over the top and crazy. So we just left it."

• Dead Kennedys use horn and guitar on their album Frankenchrist to create a Morriconesque feel.
• Seminal Post-Rock act Godspeed You! Black Emperor have done this quite a few times, with one of their earliest examples being fittingly named "The Cowboy". Another early example is "Kicking Horse on Brokenhill". Their latest album (as of 2020), "Luciferian Towers", also has examples with "Bosses Hang" and the second half of "Anthem for No State".
• Gorillaz: Tuco's leitmotif is quoted at the start of the song "Clint Eastwood", from Gorillaz.
• Havalina Rail Co. have the Morricone-inspired song "Dark Skies" on their Genre Roulette album America. The liner notes have brief explanations for each song, and the one for "Dark Skies" just reads:
  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is one of the finest westerns ever made. I think westerns have had a huge influence on him.
• Jonny & The Baptists' Edinburgh Fringe song about Clint Eastwood's speech at the 2012 National Republican Convention starts out like this, before suddenly seguing into the theme from Rawhide.
• German Progressive Black Metal band Nagelfar's song "Meuterei" ("Mutiny") is essentially an attempt to answer the question, "What if Morricone wrote a black metal song?" It's got all the requisite elements: the dramatic Old West-style acoustic guitar, the horns, the dramatic chanted vocals. And it is awesome.
• Ministry's "Happy Dust" - an instrumental featuring a galloping rhythm, clean electric guitars, and synthesized brass. It was used as intro/outro music for a tour, and later saw official release as a B-Side.
• Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" sounds as though Matt Bellamy read this article while composing it in order to make sure it contained as many necessary elements as would fit. Focus on guitar? Check. Trumpets? Check. Sound effects from Westerns? Check. Galloping rhythm? That's a big check. Just in case you didn't get it, live versions since 2008 have contained a quote from "L'uomo dell'armonica" ("The Man with a Harmonica") from Once Upon a Time in the West (although the song's main melody seems more inspired by the main theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).
• Played for Drama in Poets of the Fall's "The Ballad of Jeremiah Peacekeeper" a Western inspired tale about an implicitly Messianic, Reluctant Warrior lawman that borrows Morricone's tone.
• Sabaton’s song "To Hell And Back" (the one about Audie Murphy) features Morricone-style whistles.
• Secret Chiefs 3 took their already western-sounding song "The Exile" and rearranged it with heavy guitars to sound more Morricone-ish, retitling the result "The Western Exile". They also had an unintentional example with "Book T: Exodus"—Trey Spruance took Ernest Gold's main theme from Exodus (1960) and rearranged it for "surf band and orchestra". Many, many reviewers thought the result sounded a lot like Morricone.
• Norwegian group Vazelina Bilopphøggers use Blondie's theme in their song "Duellen i La"
• "The Big Gundown" (1985) by John Zorn reinvents several movie soundtracks for which Ennio Morricone wrote the scores.

Radio

• Bleak Expectations: When Pip Bin gets drawn into a showdown at high noon in America (well, half-past nine, actually), the ambient noises around him soon start turning into an a-capella version of the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Video Games

• Blood Bros, being set in the Wild West, naturally uses the "ayiayiaaaa" riff... but only as a part of the game over jingle.
• Dandy Dungeon: Yamada's rival programmer Bronson Kawada is always introduced by a Morricone-esque riff.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has the Hidden Village, an Out-of-Genre Experience where Link clears a Spaghetti Western-style town of monsters with Morricone-style music as the soundtrack.
  • Cadence of Hyrule: The "peaceful" arrangements^note There are two different versions of this arrangement, one with an organ and one without, but they are otherwise identical of the Gerudo Desert theme^note based on the Gerudo Valley theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was originally arranged in a flamenco style goes down this route, and just in case you hadn't already figured out that it was a Morricone tribute, the arrangement quotes the first five notes of his main theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly near the end of each loop. The Morricone quote only appears in the peaceful arrangements, notably; the other arrangements, which aren't Morricone pastiches, don't have it.
• Fistful Of Gun has a song "The Devil's Broadside". It is a pastiche to "Ecstasy of Gold", complete with the same instruments and song progression.
• "Sunny's Theme" from Metal Gear Solid 4.
• "Windy Day" from Metal Slug 5.
• Jake Marshall's theme in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
• Pokémon: The tumbleweed-themed Pokémon Bramblin has a cry that sounds like the iconic whistle from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme.
• In Red Dead Revolver, the soundtrack has a Morricone style feeling to it.
• Sonic Mania's Mirage Saloon Zone has these three tracks, each one containing the famous whistle leitmotif from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• Team Fortress 2, naturally:
  • Befitting the game's own Southern-Fried Genius is the song "More Gun," the theme of the Engineer. It starts off as a cozy campfire ditty before transitioning to a tense Showdown at High Noon-esque progression, the latter half carrying the genre's signature electric guitar and brass instruments.
  • There's "The Calm," the theme to the Mann vs. Machine trailer. Towards the end, though, it opts for a more theremin-heavy retro sci-fi feel, which makes sense given the nature of the gamemode being announced.
  • The music of the official-fanmade update "End of the Line" has an Ennio Morricone segment near the end. Lots of whistling and brass is used for it.
• Timesplitters 2 has this for its wild west level, and it practically embodies every element ever used in a spaghetti western song. Whistling, church bells, trumpets, whipcracks, the electric guitar, all of it is there.
• Touhou Project: This remix of Sanae Kochiya's theme.
• The soundtrack of the Wild ARMs franchise (more specifically the works scored by Michiko Naruke) seems to have been heavily inspired by Morricone's work.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In "Marshmallow's Last Stand", the riff from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gets quoted during an Eyedscreen shot.
• In Red vs. Blue, once Jax Jones said "I just discovered the anamorphic setting on my camera! This is gonna look epic!", along with the black bars reminiscent of Leone the soundtrack started blasting Morricone-style guitars.
• RWBY Chibi Episode 5 has Ruby and Weiss face off, complete with the music and Zwei going by like a tumbleweed. Then they dramatically leap forward for... A Slap Fight.

Web Original

• The Cinema Snob: Near the end of his review of "Ricky-Oh: The Story of Ricky" Brad decides to fight against Kung Tai Ted. After defeating him he walks off triumphantly while carrying his gun, as the music quotes the theme from A Fistful of Dollars.
• The Nostalgia Critic: Done in his anniversary video "Battle of Epic Proportions".
• Red vs. Blue’s soundtrack is practically a love letter to Ennio Moricone, but special mention goes to Temple’s (unreleased) theme in Season 15. It’s textbook Morricone, but with a twist in that the instruments are all bass registers. Switch the bass for a guitar and the tuba for a trumpet and you’ve got yourself a perfect match

Western Animation

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: When he's not partying, Cheese Sandwich is a parody of Clint Eastwood's character from the Dollars Trilogy, so it's only natural he's always accompanied by Morricone-esque folk instrumentals.

• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Brush With Greatness" Homer walks towards the weight scale while the soundtrack quotes The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
  • Mr. Bergstrom in "Lisa's Substitute" walks in the classroom dressed as a cowboy, accompanied by similar music.
  • "The Front": When Grandpa dreams about the Old West similar music is heard.
  • "Homer Loves Flanders": Flanders whistles the music during a dream sequence.
  • In the episode "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)" similar music is heard when Homer returns for revenge after being ridiculed by Chief Wiggum for trying to eat extremely hot chili.
  • "The Lastest Gun In The West"
  • "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story": Spoofs the Mexican standoff scene from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" with spoofing ominous music.
  • "All Singing, All Dancing": The Show Within a Show "Paint Your Wagon" starts with Clint Eastwood entering a small desert town, accompanied by guitar and whistling... before switching to an upbeat Crowd Song about painting his wagon (The movie is real, and it really was a musical starring Clint Eastwood, but the song itself was an original work).
• Thomas & Friends: In some episodes between Seasons 3 and 7, there is a music cue for when something is about to go wrong or there is a standoff between two characters. It sounds like something out of the Dollars Trilogy.

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