LONG BLOG
Phils Game/Pop Music Similarities #254 - The Winner Takes the Marimba
Featuring Final Fantasy, Salsa and marches.
Greetings fellow game music lovers,
Mega Man series has ended and with christmas slowly approaching another Final Fantasy series has started. For warmup, we start with a tune that cannot be assigned to a single game as it has appeared in almost every entry of the series in some form. And even in a Mario game. Of course, the song I'm talking about is the victory fanfare that goes back all the way to the first FF from 1987:
Seeing the fanfary nature of the song it is no miracle that one can find something comparable in genres that makes heavy use of these musical structures. A prominent genre that comes to my mind in the context is the Salsa genre with its many brass laden outbursts. And occasionally, something appears with a similar progression to the Final Fantasy victory fanfare. The fanfare
has
*RRRDUUDU
in Parsons code and there are others with that signature.
Joey Pastrana - "En Nada Esta" (1967):
Tommy Olivencia - "Fiesta de Soneros" (1972):
I suspect that the jingle can be traced back at least to the era of marches late 19th early 20th century, although I do not have a very good sample for that at the moment. Here is what I have so far:
Harold Lindsay - "On the Wallaby" (1912):
Kenneth Alford - "On the Quarter Deck" (1917):
Next week, another prominent tune from the Final Fantasy franchise.
Phil out.