The Unusual Staying Power of 'Unsolved Mysteries'

a.k.a. A closer look at one of television's iconic theme songs.

I’ve been watching a lot of Unsolved Mysteries lately. Not the Netflix reboot—which is mediocre at best—but the original series hosted by Robert Stack that aired on various networks in the US from 1987 to 2002. A precursor to today’s true crime boom, the wide-ranging series covered everything from murders and missing persons to alien encounters and tales of the supernatural; it also routinely scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, although that never stopped me from staying up past my bedtime to watch late-night reruns of the show on the Lifetime channel.

This segment about a double murder at the Blind River rest stop in Canada still gives me nightmares:

In 2016, the worldwide distribution rights to the original Unsolved Mysteries were acquired by a company called FilmRise, which eventually put the entire series (in a slightly re-edited format) on YouTube. (Even better, many of the cases have been given fresh updates; a surprising number have actually been solved in the years since the show first went off the air, which adds a welcome bit of closure to the current viewing experience.) Over the past few years, the series has become a sort of visual comfort food for me, as I’ll often put it on while I’m making dinner, doing household chores or am simply in need of something a bit mindless to watch.

So… what exactly does this have to do with electronic music? Well, aside from being a highly entertaining series, Unsolved Mysteries arguably had one of the most iconic theme songs of all time.

Bringing to mind the work of John Carpenter—and his theme for the Halloween film series in particular—the instrumental song was spooky on its own, but as the video below demonstrates, once Robert Stack’s distinctive narration was added to the mix, the music became especially potent.

Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve heard the Unsolved Mysteries theme hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, but in the midst of a recent rewatch binge, I found myself wondering about the music’s origins.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one.