The ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Soundtrack Sounds Like ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Music
The internet has made many previously unthinkable wonders possible: I can watch movies without taxing the lower half of my body, aggressively explain to teenagers in the Philippines why they should really be getting into Riverdale, and get food delivered to my house without speaking to another human being. But apart from turning otherwise normal people into reclusive hermits, the great gift of the internet is the sharing and popularizing of minutiae. When someone online notices something neat-o, they’re free to share it with the rest of the online world, who will in turn mutter, “Huh, that’s neat,” before moving on with their own lives.
From the same passing interest in odd coincidences that brought you “Oh, weird, the Life trailer used some of the old B-roll from Spider-Man 3” comes the revelation that one snippet of Michael Giacchino’s War for the Planet of the Apes score uses the same chord progression as a theme in the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 2. YouTube user Shake The Box made note of this in a brief video, imposing the two melodies on top of one another to expose their similarity. The tale of a simian population’s rise to freedom and one Italian plumber’s journey to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from a turtle-dragon monster have more in common than we may have anticipated.
Not to be a wet blanket, but this isn’t all that uncommon. Certain chord progressions lend themselves readily to certain melodies, as has bee observed time and again in the past. At any rate, this might disqualify Giacchino from Oscar consideration for his work on the film. If Clint Mansell gets the boot for interpolating reversed samples from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake into the Black Swan score, who knows.