These Fictional Worlds Were Robbed of a Proper Soundtrack — Here's What They Deserved
These Fictional Worlds Were Robbed of a Proper Soundtrack — Here's What They Deserved
Let's be honest with each other for a second. Some of the most richly imagined fictional universes in American pop culture history have been done dirty in the music department. Either they got a few memorable themes and nothing more, or they were handed a generic score that could've belonged to literally any other story, or — and this is the crime that keeps me up at night — they never got a proper original composition at all.
Here at Tunes For Tales, we believe every great mythology deserves a great melody. So we're doing something about it. Below, we're imagining the full, bespoke soundtracks these seven fictional worlds always deserved — complete with instrumentation, tempo, and emotional DNA. Agree? Disagree? Drop it in the comments, because this is the kind of argument we live for.
1. The Wizard of Oz — Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
Okay, before you come for us: yes, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is a masterpiece. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg gave us one of the most perfect songs in American musical history, and we will not be taking questions. But — and this is a significant but — the broader world of Oz is so much stranger and darker and more mythologically rich than the 1939 film's cheerful orchestration suggests.
The Oz that L. Frank Baum built in the original books is genuinely weird. The Deadly Desert. The Nome King. The land of the Wheelers. This world deserves a score that leans into that uncanny strangeness — something that sounds like a music box that's slightly out of tune, layered over a full string orchestra playing in an unfamiliar mode. Think Lydian scale for the golden, magical moments, shifting into something more Phrygian when the darkness creeps in. A solo theremin for the Wicked Witch. A children's choir singing wordlessly under the main theme, just slightly too slow. Oz should sound like a dream you can't quite shake.
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender — The Score This Show Almost Had
The existing score for Avatar: The Last Airbender is genuinely good — Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wynn did beautiful work, and the show's use of Chinese and East Asian instrumentation was thoughtful and intentional. So what's the complaint? Scale. The show's mythology is enormous. The concept of bending as a spiritual practice, the weight of being the last Airbender, the Fire Nation's century-long war — all of it deserved a score with the full orchestral commitment of a theatrical film.
Imagine a full symphony with a dedicated erhu soloist carrying Aang's theme — something light and wandering, like a kite caught in a thermal. The Fire Nation gets low brass and taiko drums. The Water Tribes get woodwinds that move like ocean currents, never quite settling. And for the Avatar State? A full choral explosion, every voice in every language of the four nations singing simultaneously. Goosebumps. Every single time.
3. The Dark Tower Universe — Stephen King's Most Neglected Mythology
Stephen King's Dark Tower series is arguably the most ambitious American mythology since Tolkien, a multi-novel epic that pulls in gunslingers, parallel universes, and the literal center of all existence. It got a movie adaptation in 2017 that most of us are still trying to forget. The score? Forgettable.
What this universe deserves is something that sounds like Americana filtered through a fever dream. Slide guitar that warps and bends in ways that suggest broken physics. A recurring motif built on the number nineteen — appearing in the rhythm, in the phrase length, in the way certain melodies return. The Mid-World's decayed grandeur calls for something like a symphony orchestra that's missing half its players, the gaps filled by wind and static. Haunting. Vast. Slightly wrong in a way you can't put your finger on.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea — The Score American Fantasy Forgot
Earthsea remains one of the most underrated fantasy universes in American literature, and its musical potential is jaw-dropping. Le Guin's world is built on language — the Old Speech, the true names of things — which means any score worth its salt needs to center the voice as an instrument.
Picture this: a score built almost entirely on a cappella vocal ensembles, with each island of the Archipelago represented by a different choral tradition. Roke Island, home of the wizards, gets complex polyphony. The dry, dangerous Kargish lands get stark unison chanting. Solo violin for Ged's journey — thin and searching at first, growing richer and more confident as he comes into his power. And when he faces his shadow self? Silence. Then a single note, held until it hurts.
5. Discworld — Terry Pratchett's Comedic Cosmos Needs an Orchestra
Discworld is funny. Profoundly, philosophically, achingly funny. But it's also deeply humane, and any score that just played the comedy would be missing the entire point. Pratchett's mythology — a flat world balanced on four elephants standing on a giant turtle swimming through space — deserves music that holds both the absurdity and the tenderness simultaneously.
Brass band for the city of Ankh-Morpork, slightly out of tune in a cheerful way. A harpsichord for Death (who, in Discworld, is one of the most sympathetic characters in all of fiction — he speaks in small caps and genuinely tries to understand humans). Whenever Death appears, the harpsichord plays something unexpectedly gentle. The Witches of Lancre get folk fiddle — fast, earthy, practical. And the overall theme? Something that sounds like it's winking at you.
6. The Neverending Story — Expanding Beyond That Synth Anthem
Look, the 1984 film's theme song is an all-timer. Giorgio Moroder and Klaus Doldinger gave us an absolute banger, and the synthesizer score has aged into something genuinely charming. But the book — Michael Ende's original German novel as beloved by American readers — contains multitudes that a single synth anthem can't cover.
Fantasia (the world within the story) is a universe built entirely from human imagination and storytelling. Its score should feel like it's being improvised in real time — a full orchestra that occasionally loses its place, recovers, invents new themes on the fly. The Nothing, which destroys Fantasia as people stop believing in stories, should be represented by instruments dropping out one by one. By the climax, only a single piano remains, playing something almost too quiet to hear. Then, when Bastian speaks the new name, everything comes back at once.
7. Moby-Dick — Yes, the Novel, and Yes, It Counts
Hear us out. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is American mythology in the truest sense — an obsessive, oceanic epic that has shaped how this country understands ambition, madness, and the sublime. It has never received a definitive original score, and that is a cultural injustice.
The ocean itself needs to be an instrument. Field recordings of actual Atlantic waves, layered under a slow-building orchestral piece that takes twenty minutes to reach its first real climax — because Melville takes his time and the music should too. Ahab's theme: a single cello, playing something that sounds like it was once a hymn but has been corrupted by obsession, the intervals stretching further and further from anything recognizable. The whale? The whale gets silence. And then a low frequency so deep you feel it in your sternum before you hear it.
Some myths don't need melody to announce them. They just need to arrive.
So there you have it — seven fictional universes, seven scores they deserved and never got. The beautiful thing about music and mythology is that it's never too late. Someone out there is going to read this and pick up their instrument. We genuinely cannot wait to hear what happens next.
