Last night, I was watching the 1985 show Moonlighting, which features Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. During the episode “Brother, Can You Spare a Blonde?” (S02, E01), I heard a tasty synth jam that made me pull out my phone to identify who was responsible for such a banger. As the microphone listened to the music, I turned to my spouse and said, “I wonder if it’s Tangerine Dream. Based on the era, it would make a lot of sense.”
But it wasn’t Tangerine Dream. Instead, it was a mix of two tracks by Brett Weir and Ethan Hunter: “Re-Animate My Beautiful Robot” and “Fluid Pulse.” I posted it below. Make sure you steel your will. You need to brace yourself for a mouthful of glorious synth runs and drum machines:
As you might be able to tell from the “album artwork” of 80s Synth Scene-Setters 2 on the YouTube video, Weir and Hunter were hired to create music for TV.
I began to get curious about these two fellows to see what other bangers they released over the years. Coincidentally, if you look at the username of who uploaded the track onto YouTube, it seems to be Brett Weir himself. In fact, there are several more uploads of his other compilations on his channel.
Strangely, when I looked up 80s Synth Scene-Setters 2 on Spotify, it claimed it was released in 2017. I found that really bizarre considering it was used in a 1985 episode of Moonlighting. Curious to get more info on the guy and this contradiction, I did a Google search.
I quickly found the personal blog and resume website for Brett Weir. When I scrolled through his various music projects, I couldn’t find any evidence of him doing anything before 2006.
What’s up with this growing set of contradictions? You think if he wrote an OST track to an episode of Moonlighting it would be on his blog somewhere, right?
Well, here’s where it gets interesting, gang. It turns out that while searching for Brett Weir, I came up with a Reddit post of someone else asking similar questions about this particular track and coming to interesting conclusions.
It turns out borntoannoyAWildJowi, another sleuth, came to a possible solution: Moonlighting was kept off of streaming for many years due to music rights issues. Perhaps this was a solution? To overdub old tracks with retro-sounding appropriate ones so that streaming services were legally allowed to broadcast a show?
It turns out this redditor was 100% correct.
Amoeba-tower and another redditor in the thread too (Ok_Instruction_3200) both explain that yes, Brett Weir and Ethan Hunter have made a great deal of generic background music that has been used in a variety of places. And in this case, it seems that yes, the song was overdubbed. The original song was Tangerine Dream’s “Guido the Killer Pimp,” which was also utilized in the movie Risky Business.
Side note: I just have to take a moment and congratulate past me in guessing Tangerine Dream as the creators of that track. I wasn’t right about the over-dub, but I was half-right. For some reason, that’s oddly satisfying to me. Anyways, moving on…
The whole reason I can confirm that this song was played on S02, E01 of Moonlighting is because there is an active message board (in 2025, no less!) for the 1985 show. On it, Ryan K. Michaels, an admin, has made a stickied thread of all of the instances that streaming services have changed the music from its original OST.
In retrospect, this makes even more sense when viewing the episode with this knowledge, because the overdub is really loud to the point where it almost drowns out dialogue. It reminds me of content creators on YouTube who scream over music to avoid copywrite claims.
You may be looking at all this and rolling your eyes. So some nerds are documenting streaming services changing music and the overdubs are bad? Ok, Bill, great. Who cares? What the hell is the point?
The point is: people like Ryan K. Michaels are preserving history. If his website didn’t exist, we would be unable to confirm things like this and a show’s OST could be completely rewritten without us knowing. The only other way we could confirm it would be to buy a DVD of Moonlighting. In fact, it’s probably how Ryan K. Michaels confirmed all of this data in his forum post.
There are many other examples of streaming services doing this too. One that I remember vividly was House M.D. Though its original opening was Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” other countries had trouble securing rights to use this opener song on streaming services.
In different countries, distributors used different songs, so depending on which streaming service you used and when, you’ll hear a different theme. If you watched House on Amazon Prime, apparently they intersperse all three depending on what episode you’re watching.
All three are in the video here below:
This shit gets confusing real quick. So quick that articles online (like mine and this one about House) exist to set the record straight. But the article I linked to above brings up a good point I’d like to quote from:
“To this day, many are still confused over what House's main theme song is, since different streaming services play different versions…”
Despite streaming services shrugging their shoulders and attempting to put a Band-Aid on a solution, there are long term consequences to overdubbing or changing music like this. A television theme song or background music creates a mood and specific memories. It’s why the lore of the “Mandela Effect” has become so prominent. Although most times, it’s just an example of a bunch of people misremembering something…sometimes, it isn’t.
Sometimes, it’s a streaming company trying to save a few bucks and trick its viewers into believing they can’t trust themselves.
So what are you saying, Bill? That we should just not be able to have access to these shows? These streaming companies are trying their best to bring us the hot fresh content we want here!
All I’m saying is that this is a good example of why physical media is important. The only way to really preserve history is to own it. Because examples like Moonlighting and House M.D. make it very clear. If a streaming company wants to change something, they have the power to do it.
To me, the worst part isn’t that they can do it.
It’s that you might not even notice.
