Great review. And I really love this score, but I have to comment on this one thing...

> Tracks
> like the main titles piece (Fighting 17th on the album mixed by
> George Martin, the former manager of The Beatles and Hans’ onetime boss)
> managed to embed their way into the public consciousness, even showing up
> in unexpected places like early seasons of the cooking competition show
> Iron Chef ...

My wife refers to this score jokingly as the "Iron Chef" score. She had seen "Backdraft" of course, but the score didn't stick with her. In fact, by the time I met her, I was collecting scores on CD, and my cassette tape of "Backdraft" hardly ever got played.

I think we ended up watching Iron Chef because I heard the opening titles and literally did a double take. Why the hell are they playing the theme from "Backdraft"? And the editing for the Iron Chef opening titles to "Show Me Your Firetruck" is ... well let's just embrace the pun - chef's kiss. That heaping helping of cheese pulled us into watching the whole show and we were hooked. I have a lot of fond memories of watching that show in the early days of our marriage and even attempting our own cooking experiments inspired by the show.

To this day, whenever I play music from "Backdraft" my wife will declare how much she loves "Iron Chef", and even recreate Chairman Kaga's double take and bite into the pepper along with the music. Sad to say, the official reruns of those old Iron Chef episodes no longer have the Zimmer score. So the opening titles are much less impressive. But we'll always have our memories (and I'm sure there's a clip of the original somewhere on Youtube).