Record Label: Cinemusic Inc. CMR 406
Location: Galaxy News Radio
Here’s a cute little ditty about being in love and seeing life through rose-colored glasses. As with our previous library music tunes, Three Dog does not name this song when introducing it on the radio, if he does at all.
Unusually for library music, this song is listed right alongside the other more familiar vocal tunes in Fallout 3′s end credits. However instead of the plethora of copyright information, artist name, and record labels, all of that is replaced with “Courtesy of APM Music, Inc.” In contrast to the other APM tunes, this song is one of two on GNR that uses sung lyrics.
APM Music is one of the well known providers of production music, combining various music libraries and underscoring countless cartoons, films, and TV shows, yet almost anonymously.
Curiously, of the music reprised from GNR in Fallout 3 into DCR in Fallout 4, the ones that didn’t make the jump all came from APM Music.
The full track list of the 1968 release is as follows:
Dramatic Tension - Suspense - Mystery
Special Situations (Direct Cues)
2. Good Morning Dear Teacher
4. For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow
6. I’m Ticked Pink (Vocal)
7. Turn Out the Light (Vocal)
As is the case with library music, finding artist and recording information is extremely difficult as these songs were never meant to be sold to the public, instead being exclusively used for the film and TV industry. What follows is an attempt to extricate this information.
Note: Library music is typically identified by composer or emotion. Very little can be confirmed about the musicians who performed on the recording.
Jack Shaindlin on a 1963 broadcast of the Today Show promoting the silent film compilation 30 Years of Fun and his work on the music scoring.
Of Russian extraction, Jack Shaindlin was born in 1909 and kickstarted his future in music vamping on the piano to provide accompaniment for silent movies. He quips that he cued up music based on whether the figure on screen wearing a white hat was the good guy while the villain wore a black hat; though sometimes they wore no hats at all, necessitating some sheet music shuffling.
However his best known work is with film and TV, scoring newsreels, movies, and cartoons. The silver screen included Windjammer and Cinerama Holiday. The small screen includes Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Rocky and Bulwinkle and many others either working directly with the production or through his library music service. His library continues to the present day through APM in the likes of Ren & Stimpy and Spongebob Squarepants.
Rare amongst such composers, Shaindlin founded a number of library music companies which provided records including Harmonic Langlois (in partnership with Brull-Harmonic), Langlois Filmusic, and finally Cinemusic in 1965.
More on Cinemusic down below.
Given his work in film scoring, it should not come as a surprise that the earliest known use for “I’m Tickled Pink” is a 1952 film noire about a Communist sleeper cell nestled in Boston, Massachusetts.
Opening title for Walk East on Beacon! with optical soundtrack. On-screen credit for Jack Shaindlin for Musical Direction.
Some Reader’s Digest product placement during a secret exchange.
Scenes showing the titular name drop for Walk East on Beacon!, namely Professor Kafer tries to find news from the Communist spy ring about his captured son by walking east at the street intersection of Clarendon and Beacon by holding an empty cream jar in his right hand and an umbrella in his left. The rest of the film features a number of such convoluted exchanges.
Below, a 16mm print of the “I’m Tickled Pink” scene occurring approximately an hour and 9 minutes into the movie. The optical soundtrack is visible for your viewing pleasure and personal edification. To avoid further lengthening this post, more detail is given in the video description regarding the context of why two men are suspiciously sitting together in a bar while a cheery song plays in the background.
Waveform representations of “I’m” in the sung lyric “I’m tickled pink”; Top: Variable area optical soundtrack from 16mm film strip; Middle: Inverted color and stretched version; Bottom: Digitization of waveform into audible signal.
The optical soundtrack was digitized courtesy of the AEO-Light program. The song seems tailor-made for film scenes since it comes in at almost a minute and a half, shorter than most commercial songs and good for short cuts and stingers.
An advertisement for Cinemusic Inc. in the December 1, 1969 issue of the trade magazine, Broadcasting: The Businessweekly of Television and Radio. “I’m Tickled Pink” is listed under the LP for CMR 406 B.
Packing slip for Set No. 3 Cinemusic LPs
Unlike the previous library music records featured here, this record actually has a printed date of 1968, though the film is dated to 1952. Perhaps it’s another instance of library music catalogs stretching the recording date as convenient to avoid sounding “dated”.
This is an unusual instance where a film composer has retained the rights to his score and is able to repackage and reissue it.
“I’m Tickled Pink” was reissued in 1998 on a CD, Cinemusic Dance Orchestra CINE004. It is only one of two vocal tracks present on the CD, the rest being instrumentals. As track No. 20, its description is given as:
Barbershop vocal with light rhythm
However, the recording on the CD is in significantly better quality than the LP and less echo-y. If the song was recorded for the 1952 film Walk East on Beacon!, then the Cinemusic release was in 1968 or 16 years later. The Cinemusic track sounds similar in to quality to 1970s vinyl LP reissues of old film scores which previously did not have an official release.
These were often dubbed directly from the optical soundtracks with little alteration, sometimes including the dialogue and sound effects. Perhaps the optical soundtrack was scanned in much better quality for the CD reissue of this song.
Other library music records used in Fallout:
Jazzy Interlude/Jazz Interlude - Billy Munn - CBL 37
Swing Doors - Allan Gray - CBL 37
Rhythm for You - Eddy Christiani & Frans Poptie - CBL 40
Joe Cool/Stars and Teardrops - Nino Nardini - SF 1007
