Sunday, September 20, 2009

James Bond Music - Trivia and word cloud

As many of you know, I'm a bit of a James Bond fan - I own all the books in paperback and the movies on DVD. I've got a soft spot for the movie music as well, for some reason - my eight-year-old actually requests that I play my cd of Bond theme music in the car sometimes. Here's my favorite Bond music trivia question:

The most recent two Bond movies, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, have both had theme songs which did not share the title of the movie. They were You Know My Name by Chris Cornell and Another Way To Die by Jack White and Alicia Keys, respectively. What are the two previous Bond movies whose theme songs didn't share the movie's title?
(Answer at the end...)

Anyway, I got the idea in my head the other day to make a "word cloud" using all the lyrics from all the Bond themes - I thought it would be interesting to see how it worked out. Searched some lyrics databases, copied and pasted, and used a cool website called Wordle.net. This is what I came up with:



Bizarre that the largest word (therefore the one used most) is "know," huh? I guess it does pop up in quite a few songs, but I wasn't expecting it to be so big. Fun little diversion there, anyway.

OK, the trivia answer: The theme to Octopussy was All Time High by Rita Coolidge, and the theme to The Spy Who Loved Me was Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon. I'm not counting Dr. No and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which had instrumental theme songs.

2 comments:

SnowLeopard said...

I wonder how many times a word has to be duplicated to make it into a word cloud? I didn't see the word the in there (maybe it doesn't print articles?), and there are probably some other words left out- maybe mentioned only once? Interesting!

Couldn't sleep, eh? Or were you dreaming about 007? :)

kirsten said...

Really, really, really, really, really love the wordle. In fact, I'm going to use it as a getting-to-know you exercise with my new batch of students. (I think I'll have them make self-introduction wordles and post their wordles on a blog I'll make for the occasion). Really, really, really cool. Heh. Thanks.