Earle Hagen’s I Spy Theme
Film Score Monthly "I Spy" Soundtrack
Am Riff: e|--------------------------| B|--------------------------| G|--------------------------| D|--------------------------| A|---------6-7----------8-7-| E|-5-5-8-8------5-5-8-8-----|
The late Earle Hagen was sort of a chameleon in the world of composing. Whereas many of the other names in the pantheon of spy theme writers are celebrities — Barry, Mancini, Goldsmith, etc. — Hagen carved out a steady career for himself that seems mostly overlooked by the public at large. At my grandmother’s house, the first two notes of the Andy Griffith Theme, one of Hagen’s, is all it takes to get someone started, but I doubt many of the scores of listeners know Hagan’s name.
He is a talent deserving of wider recognition, and nowhere is that more evident than in his scoring for the television series I Spy. Tasked with making the transition from comedies to action thrillers, Hagen succeeded with one of the great television themes of the 1960s. Score aficionado Deborah Young wrote in a 2001 appreciation of Hagen’s work for Film Score Monthly, which later released a collection of the I Spy score:
Earle Hagen could not have been more innovative or original with I SPY. The scores he wrote were produced in Los Angeles but he frequently returned to record live and on location. The result was that every one of the 82 episodes received an original score (excluding the main themes, of course); two-thirds of those were composed by Hagen, with the rest created by distinguished composer and friend, Hugo Friedhofer. The result was what he named “semi-jazz,” a perfect marriage of local themes with the American sound. You never forgot whom you were rooting for, or where they were.
The main title was the first to feature graphic art, live action and animation, all cut to a specific tempo that he had requested. Listen to that first pulsing primal heartbeat, as you see the shadow of a tennis player, moving against a flow of foreign names. Every upward sweep of his racket is punctuated by the pluck of a violin, and the tension is built by saxophone. Then, the graceful cipher wheels slowly and his racket has become a handgun. The weapon fires; the detritus is red and assembles to form the words I SPY. The main theme is rendered fully by the burst of violins over the black, white and red of the title, eliciting both the imminent tension of the series and the embraceable humanity of its two players. As the title drives to its pounding conclusion, a split-screen “preview” of the hour is wrought under the arresting eyes of Robert Culp. Fans of Stewart Copeland’s eclectic, dissonant score for The Equalizer might just recognize Hagen’s I SPY as a major influence.
Hagan himself discussed his composing work for I Spy with the Archive of American Television, in a video interview available on YouTube.
Here’s another video, the opening credits of the first season of the show:
