Didn't find any references on the net about this. I saw "Grumpy Old Men" on TV today and immediately recognized some bars from "A Whole New World" from "Aladdin" at the end of the movie. "Aladdin" was made 1992 and "Grumpy Old Men" 1993. Alan Menken wrote the marvelous music to "Aladdin" as well as to a bunch of other Disney movies. But the IMDB pages didn't mention any composer for the soundtrack to "Grumpy Old Men". This is the longest musical theft plagiation quote I've discovered.

Welcome to the other side.

There is literally no end to the anomaly you have experienced. Once my compositional vocabulary reached a certain point, I realized that anomalies like this are not only possible, but inevitable. Musical genres have their limitations.

Especially if the composers all share the same inspirations.

The 2009 Startrek soundtrack takes a lot from super hero movie sound tracks (Spider man, X-Men, etc) to the point they could just swap the sound tracks and you really wouldn't miss anything.

That reminds me, I see Inon Zur on most movies & games nowadays. The man must have some pre-made parts for songs or something, he can't work so fast to have so many developed soundtracks for so many big-hit movies and games released very close to each other.

That's normal. Ennio Morricone works precisely like that. He's composing tunes and themes for future use. I'm sure he has a way of sorting them somehow. Then when he starts to work on a movie, he uses his big collection, copy & paste, and of course gives it a finish.

Ok, still a bit harsh. I should have said "the longest musical similarity".
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These are the two melodies, the melodically differing parts are marked. The first bar is just the pickup bar, which by definition doesn't have "stress" on it. But then happens the following. We have three phrases, bar 2, bar 3 and bars 4-6. Alltogether this is a somewhat uneven structure, compared with a dull repeating 4 bar (or 2 bar) phrases structure (like "You Raise Me Up", which also by the way has perfectly re-used at least two tunes. Cookies if you tell which.) 3 phrases and a structure that is slightly different from "standard" is almost a little bit too much, despite the differing pickup bar and one or two notes.

I've composed some music and a few times I've experienced very strongly how a melody really writes itself. It's a magical feeling and when that has happened, I've always been very satisfied with the composition. But meantime I've always had the feeling that I have rewritten someone else's music. In this case I guess it's quite possible that the two composers really have come up with the same 3 phrase melody "by letting it write itself". Together with the harmonies it has a very romantic promising feeling. Besides, the production times of two movies being released on subsequent years must overlap so much that the composer of the second movie can't have seen the first movie before working on his own music. Or if he has, the music must me in very fresh memory and this would be an intended plagiation.

I'm just going to nit-pick, sorry:

It's more like they all belong to the same class.

In most cases, the techniques that would be used in 90-95% of the music in a major Hollywood film are based on a predetermined formula. Let's say you have an action sequence in a epic adventure film. Will there be drums? You can bet on it. Will it be in 4/4? Absolutely. What will the tempo be? Fast. Will it be in a Major mode? Definitely not. What will the orchestration be? Primarily Strings and Brass. This "cake mix" is ready to go and just needs to be mixed with milk.

If you want to hear some music that's taken strait out of the template, listen to Lord of the Rings (I have Fellowship of the Ring). It's some of the most vanilla score you've ever heard in your life. But people don't remember the actual body of the score. They remember the theme, which is less than 1% of the work. (and it's still derived from the same "noble-sounding" progressions you would use for anything else with that purpose)

Another reason people don't immediately notice the similarities is because it's in the background and works subconsciously and associatively (as in, you associate 'scary' music with being scared). If you write something different than expected, you will disrupt the association that exists within the listener and confuse them.

They're almost too close to be called considered just similar. I would say that the two overlap.

I'll even go as far to say that this is the case for most music that is made today - not just film scores. Music evolves in the Darwinian fashion. There are certain musical "genomes" where a particular configuration of "music DNA" works effectively, and they are the genres. And like in biology, they evolve through iterations. Each artist is merely an "output port" and "interpreter" for the musical dialogue that is currently being discussed. For us, these iterations can appear vastly different, when in fact they are nearly identical.

I think that's pretty much how it actually works.

I actually pay close attention, crappy music bugs the crap out of me. Even if its an excellent movie other wise, a bad sound track will absolutely ruin it for me. I have no real problems with a forgettable sound track. Forgettable is far better than bad.

Am I reading the music wrong? I tried playing it on my flute, and with some slight variations, it sounds like the Wassail song. Right about where the meter changes.

That's an astonishing blatant theft. As you say, that clip from Grumpy Old Men is instantly recognisable as A Whole New World.

Interesting observation. I doubt I would have caught it if I was watching Grumpy Old Men casually and not listening for it. However, here are two that jumped at me right away: Someone mentioned the Lord of the Rings theme. Anybedy know the hymn, "This is My Father's World"? Same song. And if you play Super Mario Galaxy 2, the theme song for Cosmic Cove Galaxy sounds an awful lot like the X-Files Theme.

If anyone else here has seen both the A-Team and Full Metal Panic, you might have noticed a song in FMP that borrows heavily^[1] from the A-Team theme.

FMP:

A-Team:

Of course I'm pretty sure it was done on purpose.

You're right. There must have been some hidden messages in the lyrics:

Aren't hymns public domain? And the hymn "What Child is This?" was taken from "Greensleeves".

When I was in middle school band, we played this piece called "Of Castles and Kings" and it had the same melody as:

You know, the main melody for the Final Fantasy series. Not sure which one came first. I can't seem to find an original recording or score of the band version. There are several other pieces for band called "Castles and Kings" and "Of Castles and Kings" but I can't find the one we played.

Only if it's past 70 years since the creator's death. (Not that creator.)

"Of Castles and Kings" sounds familiar. We might have it in our orchestra library. We have some 550 titles.

Well I'll be damned! I clicked on Thomasu's A-Team link, and seen the Rocky theme in the sidebar and wanted to listen to it just for old times sake. This version had some trumpets at the beginning that I don't remember, but remember that part very well from an old abandonware DOS game called "4D Boxing".

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You know, I just realised that some early NCIS episodes leeched the Crimson Tide theme. I thought that sounded familiar.

Check THIS out:

(oops, had originally pasted the wrong link)

Yep -- the name of that song in FMP is Tokkou Yarou; which is the name the A-Team was given when the show was aired in Japan (特攻野郎Aチーム; Tokkou Yarou A-Team -- It translates to something like "Special Attack Bastards A-Team").

Hey Johan, you posted some notation. What program is that from?

weird, I had the same thing happen this year -- I noticed a whole new world similiarities in a song from a movie that I just went and saw in the last couple of months -- I whisper/sang it in the ear of the girl I was with and she busted up laughing, so I know it wasn't just me.

I can't think of what movie it was though, it might have been iron man 2, but that doesn't sound right -- maybe towards the end when they're flying away or something... maybe.

That's a screen dump from MuseScore, a free editor really worth a shot! I don't think I'm going to update my Encore anymore. MuseScore works on Win and Mac and maybe on Linux, too.

I didn't know they were still making Encore. MuseScore looks like a decent program - don't know about the name, though.

That would be one of the very few cases when the Japanese title is better . Still, it'd be even better if they actually named it "supeshii ataku basotarudu".

Well, the word they use is 野郎 [やろう], which is listed in dictionaries as "rascal", but colloquially is used whenever you want to refer to someone in a crude manner. Like saying "that bastard over there", or such. Literally the kanji mean "rural" (with the implication being "uncultured") and "son".

Is that pronounced 'binbo' or similar?

Is what pronounced binbo? 貧乏 [びんぼう - binbou] means "poor" as in having no money, if that's what you mean.

Ah, I was told it was a low class person like a fisherman.

Well, fishermen were pretty high-class people in feudal Japan, on the level of rice farmers -- both of which had much higher status than merchants, artisans, etc., and were just below samurai in the class hierarchy. Actually, merchants were the lowest of the recognized classes. Below merchants were the classless, the social outcasts, such as burakumin (部落民), people who dealt in unclean or tainted trades (for instance, tanners or butchers).