"Strarcrossed," the hot disco track from the Price is Right (1976)

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/18/strarcrossed-the-hot-disc.html

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this sounds like the interstitial/background music for any prime-time show of the same period. i could see Ponch & Jon in an extended sequence riding their motorcycles to investigate something on CHiPs, or Charlie’s Angels checking out leads, or Dan-o on Hawaii Five-O driving along the beach, inspecting something offshore with his binoculars.

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I could hear the music in my head before even hitting play, shows how The Price Is Right has seeped into the zeitgeist.

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I remember someone calling bebop drummers “stone-faced practitioners of chaos.”

I think the same could be said for Disco bassists.

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I think the not-white-haired Bob Barker is blowing my mind the most.

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That extended cut, they should play on a loop in elevators and during interrogations.

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Amazing - they didn’t even have synthesizers back then. It took something like twenty people, banging on drums and blowing into tubes!

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The disco soundtrack of The Price Is Right did much to ingrain the show in my consciousness, I suspect.

I think I got this techno house remix off Napster some twenty years ago and it has been a fixture in my Winamp playlist ever since.

Also featured prominently in the show is “Splendido!”:

I remember that because one enterprising individual once decided it deserved lyrics. Everybody sing along now!

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I recognize “Starcrossed” as the music played during the Showcase Showdown. “This showcase including a trip to Austria and a pair of Jet-Skis can be yours…if the the price is right!”

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A BRAND NEW CAR!

You could win this 1978 Chevrolet Chevette, featuring 3 speed manual transmission, AM radio, and California emissions.

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Thanks for that remix version!

I too had a copy from Napster, though had lost it over the years. Ripping it from YouTube now…

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pretty sure they had synths in 1976! One of the show’s composers, Edd Kalehoff, was a famous Moog performer.

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Well sure, but they hadn’t fired the whole damn orchestra yet.

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what do you use now? All my Youtube ripping tools were web-based and have disappeared…

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It wouldn’t have been out of place at all.

It sort of echoes the sixties vibe (think Quincy Jones), making me think of something like Bullitt as well.

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The youtube-dl script (usually) works nicely. Feed it a YouTube URL and it will fetch it for you.

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I like the old and the new track, but I feel like the 2001 house version owes a debt to this late 90s hip hop song which mined the sample and was popular in the clubs.
I actually prefer the clean version because it used neat sound effects to bleep the cusses (think KRS ONE’s Love is gonna get ya’s clean version, if you’re familiar) but nobody seems to agree with me because the only uploads are all dirty:

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I have one site I keep using which does YouTube to mp3 I find via duckduckGo search.

They list a couple there, I tend to just take the top one and use it.

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makes sense for a duckduckgo search, that is definitely a service Google would downrank…

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I got the Dead cover band I was in in the early 2000s to play the original theme. We had fun learning it and jamming on it a bit. We played it out a few times, but since we didn’t have horns or flutes or glockenspiel, it never really captured the spirit of the original. Lots of fun though!

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