Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Hooked to the Silver Screen Edition Part 2
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
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Summary
If you need confirmation of Hollywood’s vast influence on mass culture, look no further than the pop charts. From the 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through this year’s KPop Demon Hunters, soundtracks have launched hits, defined genres—and sometimes even eclipsed the films that inspired them in the first place. Rock classics, funk jams, rap bangers, even Christmas standards: all became hits because we heard them first at the cinema.
Join Chris Molanphy as he unspools nearly a century of hit movie music, from Simon & Garfunkel’s groundbreaking ode to “Mrs. Robinson,” to the, ahem, titanic tin whistle of “My Heart Will Go On.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to hit parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris |
| 0:23.5 | Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:29.9 | On our last episode, we talked about the early history of the movie soundtrack, from the Bing and Judy hits of the 1940s to the Elvis |
| 0:41.4 | hits of the 50s and 60s, and all those show tunes from movie musicals. In fact, most chart-topping |
| 0:50.4 | soundtracks were from musicals until 1967's The Graduate soundtrack started a wave |
| 0:58.8 | of contemporary rock, R&B, pop, funk, and disco on the silver screen. And 1977's Saturday Night |
| 1:09.0 | Fever kicked off the soundtrack's blockbuster era. We're now in the 1980s. |
| 1:16.2 | The dawn of the music video age is about to change the way movies look and sound, and pack |
| 1:23.9 | soundtracks with even more chart hits. |
| 1:32.4 | For a few years after Saturday Night Fever and Greece, |
| 1:36.0 | no soundtrack topped the Billboard album chart. |
| 1:41.3 | That pair of John Travolta Fuel Smashes had set a high bar. The drought was finally broken by Greek instrumentalist Vangelis, whose score to |
| 1:48.8 | 1981's Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Chariots of Fire, topped both the album and singles |
| 1:57.3 | charts in May of 82. |
| 2:13.6 | Music and singles charts in May of 82. Chariots of Fire was both something old and something new. |
| 2:19.6 | As the lush score to an Oscar winner, it had old-school Hollywood energy. |
| 2:25.5 | As music composed largely on synthesizers, it pointed the direction soundtrack music was headed in the 80s. Soon, movie music would be mostly |
| 2:38.0 | synth-based, but in the MTV era, it would get a lot flashier. She's a maniac, maniac on the floor. And she's dancing like she's never danced before. Not long after MTV |
| 2:58.6 | Not long after MTV launched in 1981, Hollywood movies began emulating the tropes of music videos, quick cuts, kinetic editing, and relentless |
| 3:11.4 | rhythms. The 1983 soundtrack to Flash Dance, starring Jennifer Beals as a Pittsburgh welder |
| 3:20.6 | who moonlights as an exotic dancer, generated a platinum soundtrack that spent two weeks |
| 3:27.8 | atop the LP chart, plus two number one hits on the Hot 100. Michael Zembello's Maniac and |
... |
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