MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

When Joseph Stefano of Daystar/ Villa di Stefano Productions was approached by ABC network in 1963 to create a pilot to a new series, he was skeptical. The show, The Unknown, was meant to replace The Outer Limits, which was to be cancelled at the end of its first season. Stefano was asked to write two versions of the pilot: one with science fiction elements and one without. Series associate producer and composer Dominic Frontiere wrote the score for the pilot. The Outer Limits was not cancelled at that point and The Unknown pilot was never purchased for a series, so Stefano decided to use the science fiction version as the season finale for The Outer Limits, retitling it “The Forms of Things Unknown” with Frontiere’s music for the score. In 1967, Daystar/ Villa di Stefano Productions was now defunct. That same year, Quinn Martin produced a new series called The Invaders about an architect who learns of a secret alien invasion. Once again, Frontiere was approached to write the music for the series. In addition to his new cues, the pilot episode, “Beachhead,” contained a large majority of cues from The Outer Limits and the narrative contexts of the cue reuses are striking. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the music from the first season of The Outer Limits—now four years old—is reappropriated into the pilot for a new series of the same genre, an episode that serves to set up the future of the series. I will discuss several individual music cues to elucidate the link between the two narrative contexts and the ways in which choices to reuse music from a popular science fiction series—which viewers of the new show would likely recognize—were made.