With the retirement of Bob Parker, host of CBS’ long-running Price Is Right televised game show, Kevin Thompson at the Palm Beach Post shares his top 10 reasons why the Price felt so good. I’ll skip to reason number six, because it references my dad, the genius behind the Price Is Right theme song:
6. The catchy theme song: Let’s face it — no matter what kind of bad mood you’re in Price‘s theme song will always make you feel happy and upbeat. Remember, most times when people are watching Price, it’s because they’re at home sick or unemployed. When you have a fever and the flu, your spirits aren’t exactly soaring sky- high. And when you’re between jobs and staring at a mountain of debt, you don’t exactly feel like celebrating. But once you hear Edd Kalehoff’s zippy theme music, all your problems appear to fade away — at least for an hour.
The Price Is Right theme is pretty amazing considering not only it’s staying power, but the affection it lured simultaneously as both a cult and mainstream favorite, a paradoxical, unearthly phenomenon.
But my dad’s no one-hit wonder; he has the tendency to reinvent himself over and over and over and over again. I’m just glad he’s now supplementing his livelihood beyond popular broadcast and cable television themes, because that industry’s fragmentation is resulting in a steady erosion of once-abundant funding that went to high-level composers, orchestras and productions. I’m all for open-sourcing and crowd-sourcing, and democratization of media and information pipelines, but the genre of classic, high-caliber television musical productions, like the Price Is Right theme, may be endangered in this new information age. Many artists will have to seek commercial outlets elsewhere, and the evolution is far more complex than simply figuring out the best way to monetize albums and jingles online. That, of course, is the popular debate led by the faltering record-industry establishment.