Why is the X-Men theme song so catchy? ‘It just rips,’ say X-Men ’97 composers

polygon.com:

Taylor Stewart and Andy Grush have been scoring movies together as the Newton Brothers for 15 years. They’ve worked with contemporary greats like Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman, they composed the scores for Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Fall of the House of Usher, and they just spent who knows how long marinating in the music of X-Men: The Animated Series in order to craft the music for its sequel, X-Men ’97.

So what, in their professional opinion, makes the original, indelible X-Men: The Animated Series theme so memorable?

“The lick is just super catchy,” Grush told Polygon via video. “It repeats multiple times. Even when it modulates it’s playing the same thing — we’re moving up and then moving back down. And then I love the triplets section that it goes to. It’s brilliant. It changes everything up, feels very dramatic and dynamic, and then you get right back into [the lick]. And it just, like...” He paused, considering. “It just rips. [...] That’s the only way I can describe it. It just rips.

“Taylor and I feel really lucky to have been able to work with that material.”

That material was the work of composer Ron Wasserman, who also scored such 1990s standbys as the opening theme to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Stewart and Grush both hold it in fan reverence. Nevertheless, the first question they had to answer was whether to simply replicate Wasserman’s driving, synth-forward theme, or to reinvent it for a new show and a new decade.

Stewart said they prepped seven or eight different takes on the Animated Series theme for review. Some were fully orchestral, some synth-heavy, “some were way more modern, a couple sad and more minimal.” From there the process was all about balance.

Nostalgia, or an update? “We wanted to keep it based in the original that we all love, because that’s what we remember as kids. That’s what we all get excited about,” Stewart said. Original analog synth machines, or modern digital ones? Grush said he relished a chance to use a