Friday, May 20, 2016

Can you name that Dark Shadows tune?


There are few television programs that have been pored over by fans as much as DARK SHADOWS. Pound for pound, I'd speculate that this show has been studied, dissected, cataloged and fanfic'd by its fans with even more tenacity than the notoriously obsessive Trekkers. I mean, anybody can fixate on a paltry 79 episodes of a television show, which is all STAR TREK racked up during its initial run. But it takes a true maniac to lend that same passion to a series with more than 1,000 installments.

An the sheer volume of episodes here can be intimidating. There are many long-time (and extremely knowledgeable) DARK SHADOWS fans who have never even seen the entire series. Meanwhile, folks like our own Patrick McCray make it a point to scale fandom's Kilimanjaro as often as possible.

Nicholas Mooneyhan is another of these intrepid explorers. He's written episode guides for both DOCTOR WHO and DARK SHADOWS, proving he's not a man that believes in passing fancies. So it was flattering when he asked me a few weeks ago on Twitter if I could identify a piece of music in an early episode of DARK SHADOWS.

Unfortunately, I could not provide him with an answer.

The music can be heard during episode 266 during Liz Stoddard's nightmare. Mooneyhan says this piece of music isn't included in the sprawling 8-disc collection of composer Robert Cobert's score for DARK SHADOWS, which contains 490 tracks and runs for more than seven and a half hours. There are a few possible explanations:

1: It's a licensed track that wasn't written by Cobert
2: The recording has been lost
3: The selection was simply overlooked when compiling the soundtrack

You can watch the episode below, courtesy of Hulu. If you have any ideas about the origins of the music, feel free to chime in below or on Facebook.

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