When I was a little kid, there was a recurring ad on television. The ad was for a collection of music you could send away for called “From Classics to Moderns.”
In the ad, an older guy with a mustache showed up on screen and introduced various popular songs, and then revealed that the music for those songs was actually lifted from classical music. For example, the music for “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” is actually straight up lifted from the “Fantaisie-Impromptu” by Frédéric Chopin.
My favorite moment was when the ad started playing the song “Stranger in Paradise” from the musical Kismet (one of my favorite melodies). At that point the man with the mustache would proclaim, rather dramatically, “But did you know that this is actually the ‘Polovtsian Dance Number Two’ by Borodin?”
After I grew up, I totally forgot about that ad. But then something happened many years later, when I was in grad school.
There was a review in our local newspaper for the Jim Jarmusch film “Stranger Than Paradise”. Except they got the title wrong, and printed it as “Stranger in Paradise”.
The moment I read that, it all came back to me. I found myself proclaiming out loud, rather dramatically, “But did you know that this is actually the ‘Polovtsian Dance Number Two’ by Borodin?”
It felt ridiculous, but also oddly freeing.