Well, let's begin with where some of these light-fingered likely lads get their first back-of-a-truck inspiration...it's pretty easy to draw a throughline starting in deep history, tracing things through folk and church music until you start seeing where more formal composers started lifting and mutating things. Once…

Cobert's work for the Dark Shadows TV series was pretty much on a standard basis — there was a lot more library music used in the 1950s and 1960s. But you're right, Cobert seemed to have a set of cues that could be adapted for whatever spooky thing he was scoring, sometimes to excellent effect, and sometimes to…

I've liked Powell's work when I've come across it. I should probably check out more of it. I'm mainly familiar with the Bourne scores, and his score for Paycheck.

No worries. I used to write about music for a living, so I can go on endlessly.

Have you ever heard Monty Norman's original piece? You can find the bones of the Bond theme in it, but, damn, radical reworking is the phrase for Barry's arrangement.

If you truly want to get into the musical recycling side of things, you need to go with television, and the all-time champions of the art...Mike Post & Pete Carpenter. Fun music, mind you, just so homogeneous due to the Post/Carpenter studio producing (with able assistants) so damn much music that recycling cues…

Giacchino's greater sin, for me, is his outright blandness — I find many of his scores nigh-unlistenable, and that's without getting started on the ambient scoring stuff (there's a bit of a throughline from John Carpenter (swiping from Tangerine Dream) to Angelo Badalamenti on Twin Peaks to Mark Snow on The X-Files to…

Jerry Goldsmith. The Star Trek music may be part of his library for that show (possibly not, though, as Jerry Fielding was the one who tended to bring the brassy shock moments along.)

And then Shirley Walker picked up that theme and, pardon the expression, ran like the wind with it. I highly recommend the score album from the series.

The American Hustle score I actually missed, but Midnight Run and Sommersby are in the collection, as are Nightbreed, Dick Tracy, Epic and a pretty good (though not quite complete) collection. Also, his scores for the Burton films are definitely not samey, or, in a lot of instances, vastly similar aside from the…

That's the thing...I've listened to a lot of Elfman, from the Forbidden Zone through to Epic (and possibly beyond), and, yeah, he recycles, though in a lot of instances he's doing so because that's what's in the brief.

Hell, he outright mugged Prokofiev's music in a dark alley and made off with everything in its pockets.

The fun part of listening to the Star Wars scores is playing spot-the-reference. From talking to the first chair violinist from the LSO of the time that the Star Wars score was recorded ("Luke Skywalker paid for this very nice Stradivarius I bought last year!") the entire LSO was very much in the know about it, too.

I was hoping to grab the Amazon Fire Stick at Best Buy, but Best Buy is currently broken. Whoops.

Indeed, this. Although he's on the mark about Nickelback and Ronnie Milsap. However, the sneering about Bowie is hipster pretension at its finest.

Heh, maybe, but I'm in agreement with him on this scene. Also with his assessment of Shatner being signed to direct STV — "I think he'll do a perfectly good job as long as he isn't pointing the camera at himself."

Yep. When I first saw ST II: The Wrath Of Khaaaaaaaaan! I was amazed — he basically took his score for Battle Beyond The Stars and had it orchestrated for a slightly larger orchestra. Oh, sure, some of the cues are a little different, but, hey, editing.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat!"?

"It's a bat-bomb!" led to the audience response of "It sure is!" when I saw this.

John Barry was one of those composers who tended to go back to certain themes and tones all the time — you can hear chunks of his Thunderball score in Midnight Cowboy, for example. James Horner, though, may be the master of recycling.