Hoyty-Exploity! (What the greatest opening theme ever has in common with the grodiest)

 Here is possibly my favourite opening piece of music to anything. The dizzying sucker punch of its changing time signatures gave a five-year-old me a pretty good idea of what this stange new word "Invincible" might mean:

 And now here's possibly my least favourite opening piece of music to anything. I met it again recently over the opening credits to Ed Wood's Jailbait (Ed Wood films have also been a consideration for Wednesday's blogathon) but for me it will always be the theme from Mesa of Lost Women, Howco Production's even worse tarantula-human-hybrid thriller. When Jailbait's composer credit "Hoyt Kurtain" came up I thought, I've come across that name quite recently, so I looked up what else he'd done and it turns out I actually have a whole CD of Kurtain's stuff, it's just that Ed Wood spelt his name wrong:

 So the same composer was responsible for both my favourite and least favourite opening themes ever, and further research told me what I should really have known, and you might know already, that Hoyto was also responsible for the brass-heavy theme tunes and incidentals of pretty much every Hanna-Barbera show too:

 Oh, but I haven't posted the opening to Mesa of Lost Women! It's Curtin's first composer credit, and I'd like to think in retrospect that, fully aware of the quality of this project, he was simply trying to match it by improvising the worst piece of music he could. It was good enough for Ed Wood to re-use though, and it also has changing time signatures. I'm actually posting the whole film below because I don't know how to cut it, so watch as much as you like. No. You're welcome.

 

"Strange, the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos, the creature who calls himself 'Man'. He believes he owns the Earth, and every living thing on it exists only for his benefit. Yet, how foolish he is. Consider, even the lowly insect that Man trods underfoot outweighs humanity several times, and outnumbers him by countless billions. In the continuing war for survival between Man and the hexapods only an utter fool would bet against the insect. Let a man or woman venture from the well-beaten path of civilization, let him cross the threshold of the limited intellect and he encounters amazing, wondrous things, the unknown and terrible. If he escapes these weird adventures with his life, he will usually find he left his reason behind. Perhaps that is what happened to these two souls, lost in the Great Mexican desert. But then ask yourself, why would anyone trod from the usually well-travelled roads of this Modern Age, from the luxury of an air-conditioned automobile? It's difficult for our modern world of statistics and electronics to accept miracles, but you could almost call this a miracle. A genuine miracle. Out of hundreds and thousands of square miles of heat and seared wasteland, where the vultures wait for the other vultures to die, an American oil surveyor has chosen to explore this particular terrible corner of the Earth: the Muerto Desert. The Desert of Death. This surveyor can scarcely credit his eyes. Perhaps they're only elusive images, produced by roasting the optic nerves. But if they do exist, if they are living things from somewhere, one fact is certain: miracle or not, they will not be living things for long. The Muerto Desert, true to its name, will soon convert them into dead things."

Trod?