Going Ape!

The 1981 Paramount Pictures film Going Ape!'s most prestigious contributor was veteran composer Elmer Bernstein, who was in the midst of his comedy cycle. In spite of being a goofball comedy, Going Ape! required music from Bernstein that was deceptively complicated—with a great deal of thematic material—and saw the composer collaborating with the filmmaker on enough songs to nearly qualify the movie as a musical. Bernstein''s score (sourced here from 2" 24-track masters) is full of the engagingly good-natured comic writing that made the composer such a perfect fit for the genre. He even adapted Nino Rota's theme from The Godfather to play as muzak in two restaurant scenes, not-so-subtly reminding the audience of actor Frank Sivero's connection to the classic gangster films.