Via Geektyrant, TMZ, and the Daily Mail comes today’s potential awkwardness:
You know Marvel’s “X-Men” as defenders of justice, but a TV show — in Hungary of all places — claims Wolverine and co. are guilty of stealing the theme song to their hit cartoon.
A guy named Zoltan Krisko is suing every media giant you can imagine — Marvel, Disney, FOX, Apple, Amazon and more — claiming the TV execs behind the animated series from the ’90s jacked the intro music from an even older show … called “Linda.”
I gotta admit: a lot of times when I hear stories like this I go “Well… maybe?” when I hear the supposed similarities. I’m not doing that now. Those two melody lines do sound a lot alike, at least superficially. Mind you, some elements of the story sound weird, like the delay and the suggestion that of course everybody in the industry knew what was coming out of Hungary in the 1980s: but that may just be my own cultural chauvinism talking.
It’s gonna be interesting to see whether Disney fights this one.
Remember that the Iron Curtain was still in place in the ’80s. Sure, US people could have gotten hold of episodes of an animated show from Hungary. But I don’t think Hungary had VHS, which would have meant that the Marvel people (or whomever) would have needed to get actual film out of the country to get hold of the tune.
Why would they have gone to that much trouble?
Short of being a note by note reproduction, I’d need to see a very convincing explanation of how the show creators got the tune to begin with.
This x3000
The X-men theme is *at least* 25 years old – yet still after the Soviet dissolution. Only now there is a legal challenge?
IDK, sounds closer than “He’s So Fine” and “My Sweet Lord”, and we know how that went.
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OTOH, they both sound like a sort of generic action theme song I’ve heard countless times before.