I love the movies. More to the point, I love going to the movies. When I was a kid I loved seeing movies, but I really started going to the movies in college (the scene of so many discoveries, I know.) Everyone at the U had a writing requirement in their first year – everyone took the same course first semester, but you got to pick the second semester course. So, I picked “Rhetoric of Film.” NOT a gut course, I assure you. We had to write a lot, but the fun part was that we got to see a different film/program every week to write about. One week was Persona. Another week was a bunch of Max Fleischer cartoons (“Popeye”, the Superman shorts.) But every week was awesome, and I grew to love and appreciate every aspect of great film – the cinematography, the writing, and the music.

Music has always been a key tool of the filmmakers’ craft, used to create mood or convey thoughts without dialog. In the mid-70’s filmmakers (starting pretty much with Saturday Night Fever) began incorporating more popular music in their soundtracks, and relying less on traditional, original musical scores. (TV, too – The Sopranos was masterful in its music selection.) Blockbuster movies especially leaned heavily on pop music. It’s become a game of mine to rate movies based on how awesome the song selection is. High Fidelity, of course, gets top marks.

But I was very pleasantly surprised when I went to see Avengers: Endgame opening weekend and found that the filmmakers were totally on their music game, capped with a scene where two of the Avengers visited another (don’t worry, no spoilers here!) to the backdrop of The Kinks’ Supersonic Rocket Ship. Whaaaaat?

“SRS” is on Everybody’s In Show-Biz, the half-studio, half-(drunkenly) live followup to the Kinks’ classic Muswell Hillbillies, and the track is often overlooked by the titanic song that is Celluloid Heroes, a legit Kinks Klassic. But Supersonic Rocket Ship is a classic in its own right. It channels the same tropical vibe as Apeman, but spools out some of the well-honed Ray Davies social observation in a way he wouldn’t do this skillfully for quite some years later. So, Marvel: well-done! If Avengers: Endgame wasn’t great enough already, including this song pushed the movie into the stratosphere.