Danny Elfman has also done Television themes.

The most famous ones in the U.K are, Desperate Housewives, Point Pleasant, Batman, Beetlejuice and of course, internationally known, The Simpsons. Each of his compositions seem to fit the program completely, Desperate Housewives, the score is mysterious and sounds like it would be set in a suburb. The Simpsons is bright and cheery, it seems to dash about, working well with the visuals as it changes from character to character before all themes come together when they all sit on the couch.

Desperate Housewives (Theme) (2004)
Point Pleasant (Theme) (2004)
The Dilbert Zone (Theme) w/Steve Bartek (1999)
Lincoln/Mercury Campaign (1998/1999)
Perversions Of Science (Theme) (1997)
Nissan Television Campaign (1996/97)
Batman: Animated Series (Theme) (1992)
The Flash (Theme) (1990)
The Simpsons (Theme) (1989)
Tales from the Crypt (Theme) (1989)
Beetlejuice: The Animated Series (1989)
Fast Times (1986)
Pee Wee's Playhouse (1986)
Sledge Hammer! (Theme) (1986)
Amazing Stories (2 episodes) (1985)

The original concept for the film came to Tim Burton while he was working as an animator for Disney. Burton says he was inspired by being at a store and seeing them taking down the Halloween merchandise and changing for Christmas displays: the replacement of ghouls and goblins with Santa and his reindeer sparked his imagination. Also, Tim loved holiday movies such as How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He also described The Nightmare Before Christmas as almost an opposite of The Grinch because instead of wanting to destroy Christmas, Jack wants to celebrate it but accidentally destroys it. When Tim Burton was deciding who to work with on The Nightmare Before Christmas he wanted to get Beetlejuice writer Michael McDowell to help, but that didn't work out and he decided to turn to regular partner Danny Elfman. Danny would come back, sometimes the next day, with a song done. Although the film was not actually directed by Burton, because he was busy filming Batman Returns, the film is steeped his unique vision within every single frame with the truly imaginative character designs and locales, which were taken from the pages of Burton's original sketches and drawings. The images in this film are alive with an amount of vibrancy and enthusiasm that is rarely seen in films, animated or live action, and is completely complimented by some of Danny Elfman's best work. By 1993, people had already seen a lot of Danny Elfman's creativity, but no-one could have been prepared for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not only was it the first full length stop-motion animation musical, but Elfman not only wrote songs and score, but he also wrote all the lyrics and performed a number of roles in the cast. Emphasizing the unique situation was that Elfman did all that for a Tim Burton film, making not only an impressive effort by Elfman, but altogether a rather demented result. The film and score was a screaming success with older children and teenagers, there was just something captivating about it at the time, and still to this day. Maybe it's just the wickedness of the whole idea of the plot, Fed up with Halloween, Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, discovers a doorway in the forest that leads to Chrismastown. Enchanted by what he sees, Jack decides that next year he wants to run Christmas, and dispatches the mischievous trio Lock, Shock and Barrel to kidnap Santa. When Christmas Eve arrives, Jack takes off on his skeletal reindeer-driven sled to deliver the presents manufactured by the residents of Halloweentown, but instead of enchanting children the world over, the gifts terrify them. Eventually, Jack's sled is shot down by the police and he returns to Halloweentown. Santa is freed and order is restored. So actually, The Nightmare Before Christmas is sort of a cult phenomenon for a people in a select age group. I completely admire the complexity of Elfman's creation. The composition itself is in a class of its own, with so many themes fitting together seamlessly. His manipulation of themes to suit the different emotions the characters feel is masterful. His expressive performance of "Jack" easily casts a shadow over the vocals by Catherine O'Hara and others. Above and beyond all the other tasks, I get the impression that the vocals caused this to be one of Elfman's favourite projects.

His taste for the bizarre made him a popular choice for the darker side of cinema. His first studio film score was for Tim Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, where Elfman pushed the comic exploits of Pee-Wee with a carnival style score.

His efforts contradicted his lack of formal musical training. Actually Elfman had not studied composition, counterpoint, orchestration or conducting, instead he picked up these skills through trial and error, and by simply composing, his Oingo Boingo bandmate Steve Bartek was along for the ride, making sure that Danny got everything from the orchestra that he wanted.

Though he was classed as an outsider in the part of the film industry dominated by traditions, Danny continued to set film music trends. His rock 'n' roll style score for Midnight Run (1988) inspired a wave of copycats, but it wasn't until 1989 when Elfman got a lot of attention.

With his amazing compositions for Tim Burton's Batman. It was this score that turned it around for Danny, firing him into A-list projects that were often tuned into his sensibilities. Also it allowed the composer to work with directors he admired or was interested in.

In the early '90s he worked with Clive Barker (Nightbreed, 1990), and Sam Raimi (Darkman, 1990), and his success with Batman made him the natural choice to score Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990). It was at this point that Elfman earned his reputation as the darker film composer alternative.

Richard Donner's Scrooged (1988), Burton's Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), all helped to develop the typical Elfman "sound", often a saddening mix of mellow choirs and distinctive orchestral writing.

The early '90s was possibly Danny's most productive period. Other than the earlier mentioned Darkman, Nightbreed and Dick Tracy, he also wrote what is perhaps his most popular score for Tim Burton's modern fairy tale Edward Scissorhands. Introducing a theme for choir and celeste, Elfman immediately created the emotional resonance of the film, and set a new standard for fantasy scores.

He wrote a straight ahead dramatic score for Jon Amiel's post-Civil War era film Sommersby, which found Elfman revising his work to match the shifting tone of the film. Sommersby, with it's arching main theme for lush strings and brass, recalls Ralph Vaughn Williams' epic "Pastoral Symphony" and remains one of Elfman's most accessible and popular scores. In the same year Elfman tackled his most ambitious project to date: Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, the stop-motion animated musical that would have 10 original Elfman songs and an almost non-stop orchestral score. Elfman not only penned the songs and helped shape the film, but he also provided the singing voice of the film's main character, Jack Skellington. While creatively successful (and now a cult merchandising phenomenon), Nightmare Before Christmas created a rift between Elfman and Burton that would last until 1996. During the "family disagreement" that caused the break-up of the collaboration, Burton would hire Howard Shore to score Ed Wood. Though, a dream Tim Burton had during production on Mars Attacks! convinced him to get Danny Elfman to score the film instead.

The mid 1990s brought changes to Elfman's "sound". Shunning the bigger melodies of Edward Scissorhands, Sommersby, and Black Beauty, Elfman began mixing pre-recorded synthesizer into his music, often mocking up his scores in his home studio and going over the percussion and synth tracks into the final mix, with a traditional orchestra performing the rest of the score.

The watershed score for this transition is the Hughes Brother's post-Vietnam crime drama Dead Presidents (1995), in which Elfman wrote an impressive, and equally as funky score for a battery of percussion (all performed by himself), electric guitar, and Hammond organ built on top of a foundation of sawing orchestral strings. Elfman's propulsive main titles set the tone for not only the film, but also his career.

When stepping in to replace Alan Silvestri on Mission: Impossible, Elfman wrote one of his most effective scores in a short amount of time. Continuing the trend set by Dead Presidents, Mission: Impossible was significantly constructed with MIDI-driven rhythms, loops and samples. The film was a gigantic hit at the box office, and Elfman was considered the hero. Though not all of his summer '96 scores would do so well. Working with the director Peter Jackson on The Frighteners may have been fun for both the composer and director, and resulted in a romping horror/comedy hybrid score with a sickly dark streak, sadly, the film did not do well at the box office.

Flubber contained all the quirky signatures we have come to love from Elfman it also contains some oddly classical sounding tracks that are laced with a bit of Black Beauty. One track 'Remarkable' adds something different to the Flubber mix, freestyle jazz type stuff. There's also some beautiful and delicate music since Edward Scissorhands.

It seems that every few years Danny Elfman undergoes a major style shift that kind of redefines his music and what he's capable of as a composer. Sleepy Hollow has many of the greatest loved elements from previous scores are here. There's a grand, sweeping orchestra, an eerie boy's choir coupled with a demonic male choir. Voices can be heard howling in distance, and the Sleepy Hollow theme seems to always be lurking somewhere close by. Clever orchestrations, really strong themes, and overall, a sense of playful inventiveness. Sleepy Hollow (1999) was a milestone for Elfman who took the lessons he had learned from all that experimentation and applied them to a big action / fantasy score.

Elfman described his score for Planet Of The Apes as being melodic and simple but with a lot of muscle behind it. Fans of Elfman's current style of composing will relish Planet Of The Apes. It is a robust mixture of his recent approach to scoring action with combating clusters of brass, and dissonance. Add a huge amount of sampled percussion and the material becomes extremely thrilling.

Elfman's score for Spider-Man will immediately draw comparisons to the Batman score he wrote because of it being the same genre. However that is where the similarities end, Danny Elfman does not approach these movies the same as he did when he was first starting out, Spider-Man works well. Elfman is just as inventive as ever. And a part of the score shows that he can still write action music with the best of them, and he still has the ability to end the composition with a finale that sends shivers down one's spine.

Big Fish has sadness in the fantasy that clearly was the biggest draw for Elfman, and that is where the heart of this score truly lies. To convey this side of the film, Elfman used a theme for the character of Jenny, a young woman from the strange town of Spectre. Bloom is drawn to Jenny and almost has an affair with her but ultimately leaves her for the sake of his wife and child. To reflect these two significant women in Bloom's life, Elfman has a variation on the theme for Sandra into a minor key for Jenny, creating one of the most achingly beautiful scores the composer had written in a very long time.

In Charlie And The Chocolate Factory Each song is completely different from the last, and each one is unmistakably Danny Elfman. One song features a clever homage to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" before chugging back into full-bore infectious Elfman territory. It's here that Elfman's oxygen-defying vocals show his commitment to the music. He pulls out all the stops, moving through familiar and proven territory: a great mix of choir, percussion, looped rhythms, aggressive strings and a hypnotic, psychedelic guitar riff. It's a main title that can sit along with Elfman's best.

Batman

"I had never written a large scale, full-blown action score and to say the least, I felt a lot of pressure. It was very challenging, but in the end, very rewarding. Not only was it fun to reach back into a more traditional style which I loved as a kid, but to finally unleash some of those 'dark' stylizations of which I'm so extremely fond." - Danny Elfman, Music For A Darkened Theatre, Volume One

This was Elfman's breakthrough score, the main theme is the best Batman theme ever created and it's a real shame that the Batman series abandoned it halfway through, it's on the same level as John Williams' themes from Star Wars, Superman, or Jaws.

This is not just because of the film's box office success, but also because of its hummability and the fact it's so appropriate for the dark superhero epic. Many traditionally classical composers could probably find faults within Elfman's dark and uniquely strange score for Batman, but it doesn't change the fact that it was one of the highpoints for soundtracks of the 1980's.

The score is best remembered for the dark sweeping strings and energetic blasts of brass, but there are some quiet moments aswell, with piano, a boys choir, and a music box. Throw in all of the leitmotifs in Batman and you get a remarkably complete score. The Joker's tinkling little music box theme is just as crazy as Jack Nicholson's grin, and the mysterious cello theme is intense enough to make the audience wonder about but fearful of learning about Bruce Wayne's past.
The main Batman theme takes over the screen during a few key parts of the movie, and it really enhances the depth of the film: especially, the drumroll part when Bruce opens up his closet to get into his armour and fight the Joker for the last time, and the finale, where the camera pulls up from the city street to show Batman and the spotlight on the sky the build-up with bells and brass is enormously fun.

Batman Returns

"A visit to an old friend (The Batman Theme is still amongst my favourites). Adding the Penguin & Catwoman themes, this time around, made it wild and tricky...Juggling them for ninety-something minutes, making sure that one was always in the air. I loved the Penguin...So tragic." - Danny Elfman, Music for a Darkened Theatre, Vol. 2

The original Batman score and film ripped through the world with huge financial, popular, and critical success, and it was seemingly set for a series of highly-anticipated sequels. And even though Burton was behind the camera, Keaton was in front of it, and Elfman's score was over the speakers, both the score and film were monumental critical and popular flops. At a casual glance, it's hard to say where Elfman went wrong with Batman Returns. For the winter-esque setting on the film he introduced a new emphasis on a younger chorus and less classical orchestration. With the same title theme entirely intact from the first Batman, in addition to Elfman's maturing handling of orchestral and choral elements, the score for Batman Returns promised to be one of the best sequel scores since the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Instead, Elfman took one step forward and four steps back, the first backward step was his abandonment of the classical, orchestral construction of the original film's score. He got a little wild, threw in a lighter chorus, less conventional themes, more bizarre orchestration, and forgot that an approach suitable for Beetlejuice simply would not work in the style of the Batman established by the original film. The chorus used in the first film was a mature, deep, adult one, it helped identify Gotham City as a serious, gloomy, religious, and spiritual kind of place, a haven as it were for the contrasts of good and evil. Compare that to his "la-la" chorus in Batman Returns and that gothic image disappears.
Another step backwards was a hesitation on Elfman's part to decide if he wanted to stay with traditionally classical themes for the new characters or choose themes influenced by his past work on cartoon-ish features. Sadly, he tried to use both, composing cartoon-ish themes and then putting them in a neo-classically dramatic fashion, the score suffered from a personality crisis that the original did not. These faults could have been easily excused, however, if not for the one most fatal flaw in this score: the poor recording quality. The original Batman score was performed by a massive collective in London, and its sheer power was inspiring. The sequel score, due to reasons unknown, was performed by a regular studio orchestra in Culver City, CA.

from 'http://www.americancomposers.org/elfman_interview.htm'

Film composer Danny Elfman is writing a concert work called Serenada Schizophrana for American Composers Orchestra, which will be performed at Carnegie Hall on February 23, 2005 at 8:00 pm. Mr. Elfman is well known throughout the world for his award-winning scores for Batman, Spider-man, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mission Impossible, and the theme for The Simpsons, among many other memorable scores. This new work represents Mr. Elfman's first foray into the world of "abstract" concert music. He spoke with Jessica Lustig about his ideas for the work, his compositional techniques and his classical influences.

Q: What inspired you to compose a symphonic work?

DE: The American Composers Orchestra asked me; it came into my head because they asked. I hadn't given the idea of writing a symphonic work a lot of thought. I had begun a ballet a while back - which I still hope to finish, but for this piece I didn't have a particular agenda of what I wanted to do.

Q: How do you feel about having a performance at Carnegie Hall?

DE: I find it very intimidating. Having the concert upstairs [rather than in Zankel Hall, as originally planned] gave me about a month longer to write the piece, but it also ramped the pressure up about a hundred fold! It wasn't until I flew out to New York and heard a concert in Carnegie Hall that I realized the gravity of the situation. I thought to myself, 'this is the playground of the big boys'. It was as though my first film were Batman instead of Pee Wee's Big Adventure: I had nine films between Pee Wee and Batman, and in this case it felt as if I was skipping a few steps. I found it paralyzing, but I had an idea about what I wanted to do. I had this idea for two pianos and orchestra.

Unlike many composers, I'm not used to writing for smaller orchestra. For me this is a smallish orchestra. I'm used to about 105 players, and this orchestra has about 89. Even though the big hall is very intimidating, the size of the orchestra is more what I'm used to, compared to the size I would have had for a performance in Zankel.

Q: What is the form of the work? How many movements does it have, and how is it structured?

DE: I started writing stream-of-consciousness short compositions, and I came up with 12-15 short compositions, each about two to three minutes long. They are blocked-out, short pieces. Writing this way clears my head, and every day I start fresh. I might write anywhere between one- to three-minute pieces, then the next day I erase my memory and start again. It's just a technique I use of trying out different things before I get locked into an idea and it becomes difficult to disengage. I want to try a lot of different things before that happens. By doing this 'one piece a day' thing, I'm not allowing myself to get too locked into any rhythmic or melodic content. Then I go back and see which of these little pieces start to evolve. After looking at 14 of the pieces, seven of them started expanding and then six expanded even more. I'm not approaching this project in a substantially different way than how I would approach film music.

At first I was worried about coming up with 30 minutes of music, but now it's a suite of six movements. They are not linked in any way. I liked the contrast. I am hoping that the pieces will reflect where my mind is at this point-like a slice of my schizophrenic brain. This is not meant to be my grand masterpiece. It's very jerky. It was my intention that the totality of it was neither going to be too serious, which I wanted to avoid, nor did I want to keep it light and whimsical. It's heavy to whimsical to absurd to intense. As the pieces were coming together they also fell into an order. I let things evolve themselves.

I work super hard to get an idea going, and at a certain point the engine is running and I know where all my themes are. Then it just starts driving itself. It's very much like starting an old car. There's a huge amount of pushing at the beginning, but then it starts to go and the breaks don't work and I just have to keep steering and making turns with it. Sometimes I like where it goes and sometimes I don't. These pieces are similar. I intentionally contrast each piece with the one that preceded it. I just let these six children run amok in a room full of toys. I wanted to let it all go where it wanted and create an entertaining though baffling serious of events.

Q: How does composing an abstract piece of music compare with writing for a film in which you have visuals, characters and a story-line to work with?

DE: The big difference here was that I didn't have pictures. That was constricting for me, not freeing. It's easier to let the picture dictate things when I'm getting started, and then I'm off and running. My agent and friend Richard Kraft was encouraging me and suggesting that I take some old movies, put them on without sound and start scoring them, but I refused to do that. When I see pictures I come up with music; there is no question about that. But I didn't want to be influenced. And I'm very happy that I didn't need to do that.

The hardest part has been getting myself started: I'm very deadline driven. I would still be working on my first film score if I didn't have a deadline! I do have 20 years' experience of this kind of discipline. I know I am capable of turning a certain amount of music out per day. I haven't even seen my next movie, but the due dates are already booked. I will be ready with music for orchestra day. I'm used to that sense of panic, of being desperate for more time. No film composer can survive without a certain discipline. The lack of time is horrible. Those of us who do survive are just better at functioning in a short period of time and being creative during those periods.

Q: How do you compose? What equipment do you use?

DE: I use a lot of samplers. In my studio I have one keyboard and a lot of gear. A lot of it is in another room because it's noisy. I compose at the keyboard and I have a work table with a big keyboard and screen with a sequencer. I'll create these huge templates and use a program called "Performer", but then I send it out to a guy who puts it into Sibelius for generating the parts. It just looks like notes with no dynamics or anything before it is put into Sibelius.

Q: How did you learn to compose?

DE: I just taught myself over the years. For Peewee, I just banged things out on the piano. I knew how to write music but not read it - or at least I can only read it as fast as I can write it, which is not very fast. My musical training came from seven years of being in [the rock band] Mystical Knights of Oingo Boingo. Everyone had to play three instruments. I played trombone and guitar and everyone played percussion. We had this crazy ensemble with a homemade percussion ensemble. We built our own gamelan in the style of Lou Harrison. We were interested in jazz and I started transcribing Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and others. There was no way to create the arrangements other than to write it all out, so I kind of learned by rote. As time went on, the band shifted towards musicians who could read. I got to the point where I could write but I couldn't read. I could only read as quickly as I could write. It's like someone who can write the letters of the alphabet but can't read the words. I learned to write as I learned to read. But I did learn that I had a really good ear and I could freeze anything I heard and write it down.

Q: Have you written any other concert music?

DE: The last piece of concert music I wrote was a piano concerto for Oingo Boingo. It was a very complicated little piece. This was during the late '70s and it was a very ambitious 5 ½-minute cue. That piece was really kind of inspired by Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

When Tim Burton approached me to write the Pee Wee score it had been five or seven years since I had written any music down on a piece of paper. I asked the guitarist in the band, Steve Bartek, whether he had ever done any orchestrating. He said he had once taken a class at UCLA but that was it. So it was Tim Burton's first film, my first score, and Steve's first orchestration. For the last ten years I've been doing midi transcriptions, which are so much simpler. With the deadlines I'm under, it's really impossible to do it any other way. To write 70 minutes of dense music in 90 days, you have to have a system. The sketches I provide are very detailed, so it's really just a matter of the logistics of doing the midi translations.

Q: Do you listen to much classical music? What do you like to listen to at home?

DE: I don't listen to classical music nearly enough. My influences go back to my teenage years. Stravinsky, Orff, Satie, Bartok, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Philip Glass. I am forever attached to the music of the '20s and '30s, and that is where my primary influences come from. That period was also the birth of jazz. Between the late teens and the 1930s there was this incredible period in music I'm always going to be attached to. A lot of my classical music associations are filtered through other film composers. Waxmann, Herrmann and other film composers have influenced me. I'm told that a lot of the early film composers were influenced by Wagner, but I've never listened to Wagner, even though I've been told that some of my scores have parts in them that sound like Wagner. My film music education came through paying a lot of attention to film music as a teenager: especially scores by Bernard Hermann, David Tamkin and Korngold

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Elfman

http://elfman.filmmusic.com/

http://www.bluntinstrument.org.uk/elfman/

http://animatedtv.about.com/od/musicandsongs/p/elfmanprofile.htm

http://dannyelfman.info/

http://www.undercover.com.au/news/2005/aug05/20050826_dannyelfman.html

http://www.answer.com/

http://www.filmtracks.com/

http://www.timburtoncollective.com/nmbc.html

http://www.americancomposers.org/elfman_interview.htm

It wouldn't be wrong to claim that the director-composer relationship between Tim Burton and Danny Elfman is one of the most significant in recent cinema history. The pair have worked on more than 10 films together, and at their peak with the fairy tales in the early '90s, they could almost be said to be the musical and visual translations of the other's voice.

In the mid-90s, the two artists started to take different routes. After the intensely close collaboration on The Nightmare Before Christmas, they both decided to take a break from each other. Maybe it began on Batman Returns, when Danny was frustrated that the detailed score for the film (many fans believe it's superior to his first Batman) was lost in the audio mix; and even though he protested no one seemed to respond. Burton went on to make Ed Wood while Elfman developed as a composer. Tim Burton had a change of heart and reached out to Danny for Mars Attacks, and the two have never missed a film since. Burton had lost interest in troubled fairy tales for a while and was caught up in the more fun popcorn fare like Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes. Elfman created brilliant scores for these films, but Burton's films left the composer with little space to demonstrate the new emotional depth he was discovering. This, however, all changed with Big Fish, a project that finally brought out the best, most personal and creative parts of both artists.

Burton has said of Elfman: "We don't even have to talk about the music. We don't even have to intellectualize – which is good for both of us, we're both similar that way. We're very lucky to connect" (Breskin, 1997)

In a 2005 interview for Elfman and Burton's eleventh film project, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton wouldn't say it had gotten to the point that they could expect to work together -

"Q: Charlie marks your eleventh collaboration with [composer] Danny Elfman. You guys have been working together for such a long time. Maybe twenty-five years. Now you've got a movie where you've worked some of his Oingo Boingo influence in there with the songs for the kids.

BURTON: That was fun because I used to go see Oingo Boingo in clubs when I was student never even knowing that I would be able to make movies. So, it was kind of fun because it did kind of remind of going back into those sleazy clubs and hearing him play.

Q: Have you reached a point where you two can sort of assume you're going to work together?

BURTON: No. I mean, I enjoy working with him and he's my friend. Who knows, we may have a huge fight one day and who knows. (He laughs) I doubt it. I love working with him. He's like another character in the film, I always feel."

Excerpt from 'http://uk.movies.ign.com/articles/632/632453p4.html'

"Like 'The Nightmare Before Christmas,' writing songs for 'Corpse Bride' was a real treat. Tim's visuals make the perfect complement for the kind of stuff I love doing most. These wonderfully fun, dark, offbeat tales are the perfect platform for me to write odd, slightly twisted, obscure styles such as my favourite musical era... 1930s jazz. I only hope we get to do more in the future" Elfman said in a statement.

The musical aspects in Tim Burton's films are completely different to each other as are the films themselves, but they all share one piece of common ground, the music. The music in the films inspire a sense of wonder and whimsy in the visions Burton creates, whether the artist behind the compositions is called Danny Elfman or Eddie Vedder, and that is a piece of evidence to the sheer power and energy of Tim Burton's visions and the complimentary music.

Forbidden Zone is a 1980 black and white cult film - written and directed by Richard Elfman, the older brother of Danny Elfman, who composed the film's score, which was performed by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

The film was made as an attempt to capture the essence of the stage group's live shows on film. It received little notice when it was originally released, and attacked by some who found it offensive. However, the film has since gained a cult following.

Forbidden Zone was the first film scored by Danny Elfman. The alphabet song performed in a classroom scene was inspired by the "Swinging the Alphabet" song from the Three Stooges short Violent is the Word for Curly. For the "Yiddishe Charleston" scene, Richard Elfman had shot the sequence with him lip synching to an old recording of the song, but was later unable to acquire the rights to the recording, and had to record a new version of the song while attempting to synch the new recording with the footage.

The film's soundtrack has also become popular, and its theme song was eventually reused by Danny Elfman, who rearranged it as The Dilbert Zone for use as the theme for the television series Dilbert.

As well as the Burton collaboration, Elfman has compiled an impressively varied list of credits that include Martin Brest's "Midnight Run" (1988), Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" and Sam Raimi's "Darkman" (both 1990). He also collaborated with Todd Rundgren on the weekly music underscoring the antics of Pee Wee Herman on the comic's Saturday morning children's show. Before this thriving second career, Elfman often received song credits for Oingo Boingo songs utilized by popular movies, the most memorable being the theme song to John Hughes' "Weird Science" (1985).

Although they never really achieved the commercial break-though that was predicted for them, Oingo Boingo, still accomplished quite a lot within their nearly two-decade existence. At a time when "alternative" music had yet to breakthrough onto mainstream media radar, the band, led by front-man and future A-list film-score composer Danny Elfman made significant progress into the public consciousness. Winning a lot of popularity in and around their hometown of Los Angeles, they made a few high-profile media appearances while building a sizable amount of recorded work. The band's catalogue incorporated a few varying styles, combining darkly witty lyrics, dizzying herky-jerky rhythms and a blaring three-man horn section, all played at breakneck velocity and presided over by the playfully sardonic Elfman.

Oingo Boingo appeared out of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, an avant-garde comedy/music/theatre troupe created by Danny Elfman's older brother, Richard. During that time he had directed the underground cult film Forbidden Zone, for which Danny provided the score. When the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo disappeared in 1978, Danny Elfman, who had spent several years in France working with a theatre group and studying orchestra, made it possible to put it's musical elements into a more manageable band format.

With a shortened name, their new line-up was made up of Danny on vocals and guitar, Steve Bartek (lead guitar), Richard Gibbs (keyboard and trombone), Kerry Hatch (bass and vocals), Johnny "Vatos" Hernandez (drums), Sam "Sluggo" Phipps (tenor sax), Leon Schneiderman (baritone sax) and Dale Turner (trumpet).

And with five albums under their belts in spite of the band's increasing popularity, Oingo Boingo wouldn't release a new album for another two years, due in part to the demands of Elfman's growing career as a film composer. His inventive score for director Tim Burton's feature debut, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, would mark the beginning of a lengthy collaboration between the musician and filmmaker.

In 1987, the band returned with the album 'Boi-ngo', with 'Boingo Alive' in 1988 and Dark At The End of The Tunnel in 1990. Their final album was 1994's Boingo (on Giant Records) before officially breaking up, giving hometown fans a final performance on Halloween in 1995.

Since the band's break-up, front-man Danny Elfman has continued to find success in his career writing film scores, particularly in collaboration with director Tim Burton; he almost exclusively employs Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek as orchestrator.

And when asked during an interview if he ever had any notions of performing in an Oingo Boingo reunion, Elfman immediately turned down the idea and said that in the last few years of being with the band he had begun to develop significant and irreversible hearing damage as an outcome of the constant exposure to the high noise levels involved with performing in a rock band. And he then went on to say that he believes his hearing damage could partially be due to a genetic predisposition to hearing loss, and that he will never return to the stage for the fear of worsening the condition.