The 10 Most Common Music Cues in Nerd-Dom

Here’s an experiment: imagine a cartoon of a skinny, bare-chested old man on the streets of Cairo, noodling on a flute while a cobra emerges from a wicker basket and sways back and forth to the music. What’s the tune playing in your head? Chances are, it’s the same tune playing in everyone else’s.

And that’s just one of many music cues that everyone knows from cartoons, movies and TV shows. However, few people know the names of those songs or where they came from. In addition to showing up in more mainstream fare, most of these pieces have shown up in geek media — especially early videogames, where they represented cheap, royalty-free ways to convey certain settings and situations — such as “it’s time to be sneaky” or “we’re in Asia” — whenever the low-resolution screen’s clues may have been a bit hard to understand.

You may have wondered about the story behind these tunes from time to time. Well, wonder no more! Today, Topless Robot unveils the secret history (and in a few cases, the lack thereof) behind these famous incidental music cues.

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