A catch up of the last fifteen years or so of The Wildhearts ►
◄ My review: new DC comic series Jenny Sparks (2024) #1
It's not a new idea that personal theme songs give us motivation and purpose. It gets made explicit in TV shows and films, wrestling, and stories like Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Phonogram for example. Ally McBeal lampshades it with characters discussing and playing with the concept, and everyone has probably got some songs that give them physical shivers down the neck. TV show music for me, mostly, such as some of the Saban and Levy music in Masters of the Universe, Princess of Power and Mysterious Cities of Gold.
But a personal theme song or tune? Mine's undeniably Jimbo and the Jet-Set. It was a 25 episode five-minute Peter Maddocks animation from 1986, the same homegrown studio that did similar classics The Family-Ness and Penny Crayon, content now absorbed into Entertainment Rights / Classic Media.
In the mould of Thomas the Tank Engine and any number of other anthropomorphic object or vehicle kids story characters, Jimbo is a talking plane. He's a young audience identification character, the conceit being that a jumbo jet was mistakenly made to measurements in centimetres rather than inches.
This copy seems to be on a semi-official YouTube channel, dedicated to The Fortunes and songwriters Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway:
The theme is a fairly rousing 45 seconds of traditional band instrumental composed by Robin and Gavin Greenaway (both of whom have had huge mainstream careers) with the name of the titular character spoken over it by various voices, supposedly as he goes past over them, soaring until in the accompanying animation Jimbo flies over the air control tower and cracks the windows. The show is very "plucky little X with a tendency to be annoying makes good" and still fairly watchable, although I suspect it helped that at the time video recorders weren't common household items so things didn't usually get as over-exposed. I'm fairly sure that whether from a rerun or not that an episode about the Bermuda triangle got rewatched more than a few times, therefore I presume it got taped at some point.
Apparently all of the characters were acted by two people; well-known voice artists Peter Hawkins (whose work included Doctor Who roles) and Susan Sheridan (notably to my childhood listening, Trillian in the radio Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
Watching some back now, it feels like it belongs to an older late 70s tradition before Reagan removed restrictions on advertising and everything became MOTU, TFs, TCats, etc with big toy lines dominating and better quality animation. This isn't exactly accurate because there were tons of animated shows that had similar production values (barely more than a flip book at times) and little or no merchandise. In fact, despite the impermanence of media at the time, the series was popular enough to get several years of repeats, a few books and at least one annual, a Radio Times comic strip, 12 episodes released on VHS, tie in activity resources, a few Ertl toys I don't think I ever knew about as a kid, and even a mechanical checkout ride.
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