The theme from The Twilight Zone is one of the most easily recognizable pieces of music of the 20th century, a four-note motif for electric guitar with hair-raising dissonances that conjure up the uncanny and the unknown in an almost Pavlovian way. Its creepy-crawly charm transcends all cultural barriers; in Twilight Zone: The Movie, it even ignores cross-species boundaries, much to Albert Brooks’ dismay. The problem is that the music we all know as the theme from The Twilight Zone isn’t, in fact, the theme from The Twilight Zone. It’s two pieces of music spliced together from a stock library CBS built as part of a cost-saving and union-busting campaign. Marius Constant, the original composer, was unaware for years that he’d accidentally written the theme to a popular television show, and for decades was paid nothing beyond his original fee, even as the show lived longer than Walter Jameson in syndication. The original theme for The Twilight Zone was written by legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, but was sent to the memory hole for decades in favor of a new introduction with Constant’s royalty-free music.
