The Brave and the Jellyfish
I love Jellyfish and its a source of great personal angst to me that they only released two albums in their time together. But those early 90s records are both minor classics and the band splintered into a series of equally high-quality ventures, as key members like Jason Falkner, Roger Manning and Eric Dover all released solo material or worked with other artists in a way which guaranteed the lasting influence of Jellyfish in modern indie and alternative rock.
Oddly, however, Jellyfish's main songwriter and singer Andy Sturmer has been the least visible of the band members since the band split. He has kept himself busy, writing and recording with other bands, and there are a slew of often great solo demos across the internet for fans to obsess over, but the writer of "Baby's Coming Back", "the King Is Half Undressed" and "New Mistake" would have been the favourite to go onto great things after his band broke up.
And in a way, he has. My son loves the cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Which features an opening theme by none other than Andy Sturmer. A little research has revealed a flourishing sideline in theme tunes for cartoons, most notably the theme for the phenomenon known as Ben 10.
It felt right for me to find Sturmer at the start of a Batman cartoon. Because I had liked his theme from the first time I had heard it. It captures the excitement, brightly camp sensibility and incredible pace of the show, and its got a hell of a hook and some brilliant details to its arrangement. Check it out, and then go buy everything you can by Jellyfish if you can:
Labels: andy sturmer, animation, batman, jellyfish
posted by David N at 10:39 pm
2 Comments:
That theme is excellent, is the show itself any good?
Its the first onscreen Batman since Dark Knight Returns to shun the grim & gritty thing and instead opt for a reading of the character close to the one which was popular in the 1960s - poppy, bright and almost jovial. The format is the same as in The Brave & the Bold comics - Batman teams up with another character in each episode, which keeps it varied and interesting.
Its not as good as "The Animated Series", but its more suitable for a 2 year old - though probably still a bit too violent and complicated for him. He loves the fact that the guest character changes in each episode, and often you even get two - the pre-credit sequences sometimes feature somebody else entirely and are often the highlight of the show: tight and action-packed.
The animation is just ok but thats not the point.
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