pokemon music question

[JoshL]

Among other things, I do music and sound effects for a haunted house. It's a one-night event for a country club, and geared towards kids. It's lots of fun, and very story driven, each walk through ending with a skit. Every year the story/theme changes, and it's often video game related. This year we're doing pokémon.

My thought was to take some classic pokémon themes and rework/remix/reassemble into something creepier to go with the sound effects scenes. Easy enough, except I've never actually played any of the games (well, Snap, but I don't think that counts). So I don't know what are the iconic, recognizable bits of music that kids would connect with. Any suggestions? The crowd is about 8-14, plus or minus a year or two. Anything they would recognize would be great (and bonus points if I can grab a midi file from vgmusic.com to work with). If anything comes out cool, I'll post it here when I'm done!

Oh, and I know about Lavender Town. A friend told me this morning and it is awesome and creepy, even without the urban legend! I told the director, and we're definitely working up something with that!

[Dill Raulnor]

Watch a couple of episodes of Pokemon on Netflix. Theres some Halloween episodes that could definitely help your thought process.

[Tentreto]

If you want recognisable, you probably want mostly the main games. However the spin offs are darker and do have creepier music. Ones to look at are the mystery dungeon and ranger series.
Off the top of my head:

The Planets paralysis theme from the mystery dungeon explorers games

Temporal spire, ditto

Or N's music box from both black & white 1+2

More recognisable will be the battle themes or city themes. I remember Undella town sometimes being creepy maybe? Otherwise try the Indigo Plateau theme or a cave theme.
Lastly, there were creepy houses in BW2 and DPP so try those?
These are mostly half remembered and most are likely to be unrecognisable, but look a few up.
As a last idea, maybe try and get some Pokémon cries for sound effects?

[JoshL]

Thanks for the responses! I'm definitely looking for recognizable themes. They don't have to be creepy...I will make them creepy, that's what I do :smallwink: Mostly I want the kids to know where the music comes from, but I'm not sure what themes are most well known. I like that idea with the pokémon cries; I'll have to see if I can dig them up!

[enderlord99]

Lavendar Town.

EDIT: Oh. You knew about that.

[Tentreto]

Just came to my head after finding out team rocket said their motto over 800 times, butt the team rocket motto might be good too.

[JoshL]

Some other things came up, and I didn't have time to prepare quite as much as I would have liked, but did manage to get the Lavender Town theme in there, as well as adding some pokémon cries and a warped version of the Team Rocket intro into the sound effects beds! The battle in the final skit used the Gym Leader Battle music from the first game as well (that wasn't developed as far as I would have liked). The kids loved it, loved the card game we made and kept racing to the boss monsters to try and get better cards to win in the final room. We had a huge dragon puppet that burst out of a wall at the end too, some kids loved it, some were terrified, and some, well, both! The country club staff enjoyed it too!

Anyway, I threw together a playlist of music throughout the years; the first and last tracks are based on Lavender Town (the second adds some sound effects to it, making it even creepier). Enjoy, download if you want, and let me know what you think!
https://soundcloud.com/joshloughrey/sets/haunted-house

[mollylayne]

Thanks for the wonderful Information..