Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The frequently sampled Lalo Schifrin, who died of complications from pneumonia at 93 on June 26, composed “Jim on the Move,” an instrumental I named my Disqus and WordPress accounts after, as well as one of the highlights of the two albums of instrumentals he based on themes he wrote for the original Mission: Impossible. He had a hell of a run as a film and TV composer—from his second-season arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. main title theme, which preceded his work on Mission: Impossible, to his invigorating score for the 1998 Carlos Saura movie Tango. (There are fans of Schifrin’s score for Abominable, the 2006 Bigfoot B-movie that was co-written and directed by Ryan Schifrin, the Argentine composer’s son, but I’ve neither listened to that 2006 score nor watched Abominable.)

Schifrin was also a composer I met only once. Boy, did I fuck up the one time I got to meet Schifrin.

Back when I hosted a film music radio show for college radio and then left college radio to transform it into a 24-hour internet radio station, I didn’t interview a lot of composers. I interviewed only three. I recorded phoners with Gerald Fried (whose phoner with me I partially transcribed here) and Michael McCuistion, who regularly collaborates with Young Justice showrunner Greg Weisman.

The hardest thing about radio, in my opinion, is requesting (or trying to set up) interviews with celebrities or creatives. It has also been one of the hardest things about the project on animated Star Trek shows I’ve been writing since 2022. (It has helped kill some of the fun out of the project, which will either be a physical book or a Ghost blog, and although I got to interview “The Pirates of Orion” writer Howard Weinstein via email—he’s great to talk to—I’ve been considering eliminating the interview half of it.)

A phoner I wanted to do with Alf Clausen never happened. Schifrin didn’t have any interest in being interviewed by me on the phone when I approached him at a Cinequest Film Festival screening of Cool Hand Luke, where he spoke and received a Maverick Spirit Award, in San Jose in 2002.

By that time, I stopped doing interview segments for my radio show because chasing interviewees was too difficult to continue doing, so Schifrin’s lack of interest in doing an interview wasn’t really a big deal to me. But I’m forever kicking myself for forgetting to bring with me that night the liner notes from my copy of Hip-O’s The Reel Lalo Schifrin CD for him to sign. That’s the part of the night I feel I fucked up on, although several years later, I received in the mail a package of a Schifrin CD that came with an autographed Schifrin publicity still from Aleph Records, the label Schifrin ran with his wife and manager, Donna Schifrin, and that autographed picture somewhat made up for forgetting to bring with me The Reel Lalo Schifrin to the theater.

The night wasn’t a complete loss. I saw for the first time Cool Hand Luke, the movie that introduced “Down Here on the Ground” and “Tar Sequence,” two of Schifrin’s most ubiquitous works—what a great Paul Newman flick—and when I said to Schifrin’s wife/manager that my favorite score her husband wrote is the Enter the Dragon score, I liked her response. (She said something along the lines of “Oh, yes, the Enter the Dragon score is terrific.”) The Mission: Impossible theme, which Bruce Lee loved to use as workout music at his dojo in Hong Kong, is also legendary, but it isn’t my favorite instrumental Schifrin wrote for TV. (A lot of writers of tributes to Schifrin a few weeks ago have singled out the unconventional Mission: Impossible theme, the exuberant jazz waltz that opened Mannix each week, or “Tar Sequence,” which found new life long after Cool Hand Luke as intro music for local newscasts at ABC affiliates like WABC and KGO, as the classically trained composer’s greatest masterpiece.)

In honor of Schifrin’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is my favorite instrumental Schifrin wrote for TV, even though I never watched the show it’s from: his funky main title theme from the Los Angeles hospital drama Medical Center.

Medical Center is best known today for “The Fourth Sex,” a 1975 two-parter that guest-starred Robert Reed as Dr. Caddison, a colleague to Dr. Gannon, Chad Everett’s lead character, and a trans surgeon whose plans to undergo gender reassignment surgery are met with resistance from family members. (“The Fourth Sex” has been posted in its entirety on YouTube. I’m not sure if it will remain there for long.) Reed famously hated playing Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch. (However, he didn’t mind reprising his role as Mike in “A Very Brady Episode,” Day by Day’s amusing Brady Bunch parody, in 1989.) His role as Caddison was much closer to what he wanted to do as an actor.

Reed’s experiences as a closeted gay man fueled his performance in the two-parter, and he earned an Emmy nomination for his work in “The Fourth Sex,” a sympathetic portrayal of a trans woman that was written by the late Rita Lakin, the creator of Aaron Spelling’s The Rookies. (“TV executives insisted on star casting and a cisgender actor, and oh my, the music is too damn melodramatic. But the script is decent for 1975,” said Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV author Steven Capsuto about “The Fourth Sex” on Bluesky.) Otherwise, I know nothing about Medical Center—except I love the fuck out of Schifrin’s main title theme.

In its first season (1969-70), Medical Center didn’t have a main title theme. Schifrin wrote for the first-season end credits a majestic instrumental in the style of Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey. For the second-season opening titles, Medical Center needed a defib. Instead of repeating his somewhat staid theme from the first-season end credits, Schifrin—who was young and from the world of Latin jazz—came up with a funkafied instrumental that sounded nothing like music from Kildare or Casey and more like a jam I’d want to add to footage of a Wilt Chamberlain fast break.

“I remember that they had an animation. With animation, they did an ambulance coming toward the camera, toward the viewer,” said Schifrin to interviewer Jon Burlingame in a 2008 Archive of American Television interview. “That gave me the idea of having the sound of a siren that becomes a melody—the same sound—and I did it with a Moog synthesizer. And I had a rhythm section behind [it] doing some rhythm, so it came out alright. As a matter of fact, I got a letter of congratulations from the head of CBS for that.”

I don’t give a shit that the theme sounds like Shaft chasing a bunch of Mafiosos all over Queens. (Some YouTube commenters said they prefer the first-season end title theme over the main title theme Medical Center stuck with from its second season to its seventh and final season. These are clearly people who prefer their chicken to be unseasoned.) I love “the ambulance theme” and its pulsating bass line. Schifrin recorded an extended version of his 1970 Medical Center theme twice: The first version, which was part of Schifrin’s 1970 MGM Records album Medical Center and Other Great Themes Composed and Conducted by Lalo Schifrin, was faithful to the arrangement that kicked off each Medical Center episode, while the second version, which was meant for pop radio airplay and was released as a single in 1971 by Verve, slowed down the tempo a bit, added fiery fuzztone guitar riffs, and contained a Ray Pohlman bass line that went even harder than the bass line in the TV version.

Bonus track: The spectacular conclusion of the MGM Records version makes it sound like the ambulance is deploying rocket thrusters—like Tommy Lee Jones’s ride in Men in Black—and flying to the university hospital because L.A. traffic can go fuck itself.

“And which [extended version of ‘Theme from Medical Center’ is] better? Hard to say,” wrote blaxploitation.com’s nameless author in an early 2000s capsule review of the Verve version. “This one’s a real bomb – huge drums, very uptempo, massive fuzz/wah guitar and a wicked organ make up a superb version of the theme. The LP mix is marginally mellower, and loses the guitar, but this 45 is the dancefloor one to have.”

Another bonus track: I prefer the MGM Records version because it sounds closer to the TV version, but the Verve version slams as well.

I remember buying online Schifrin’s 2004 compilation Most Wanted 1968-1979 just for the Verve version because I wanted to add it right away to my internet radio station’s playlist.

One last bonus track: Live in Sweden, a band I never heard of called Patrik Kolar & His Funky Friends took Schifrin’s 1970 Medical Center theme and made it sound faster than the versions I posted above. It’s nuts.

In his prime, Schifrin could do it all: from the jazz that characterized the ’60s Mission: Impossible, Mannix, and Bullitt, to the orchestral folksiness of Cool Hand Luke, to the fast-paced funk of Medical Center.

Next week: I’ll be paying tribute to the late Mark Snow.