Was a Song Re-Named a Few Years After it Was Released to Tie in With an Olympic Athlete?
Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.
MUSIC LEGEND: A song was re-named years after it first came out because it was used in a clip package for an Olympic athlete.
In 1971, Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin, Jr. wrote a piece of incidental music for the movie, Bless the Beasts and Children.
It was called “Cotten’s Dream.”
A couple of years later, the pair adapted the song to serve as the theme song to a new soap opera called The Young and the Restless.
The show became very popular, and remains today one of the most popular soap operas out there.
The song also gained quite a bit of notoriety from being the theme to the program.
However, it was not until three years later, in 1976, that the song REALLY took off and in the process, amusingly enough gained a new NAME!
In 1976, ABC’s popular sports program The Wide World of Sports used the song to go along with a series of clips about the Romania gymnast, Nadia Comaneci.
Comaneci, of course, was the extremely popular Olympian who was the first Olympic gymnast to gain a score of a Perfect 10 out of 10 (she received it during her uneven bars routine – she would go on to receive six more 10s, in total, during the competition, as she won three gold medals).
The 14-year-old Romania became an international sensation, and the buzz from the Wide World of Sports montage prompted De Vorzon to re-release the song, and in the fall of 1976, the song reached the top ten on the Billboard charts.
This time around, though, De Vorzon re-named the song in honor of the young athlete who was bringing it so much new attention, and the song was now called “Nadia’s Theme,” which is what it remains called today.
Amusingly enough, Comaneci never did any routines to the song.
The legend is…
STATUS: True
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.
You wrote: “The show became very popular, and remains today one of the most popular soap operas out there.”
There are only four soap operas left on network TV, out of the maybe two dozen that were on in the early ’70s. CBS has two (“Y&R” and “The Bold and the Beautiful”). NBC has just “Days of Our Lives”, and ABC has just “General Hospital”.
True, but the fact that it remains while the others were all canceled speaks to its popularity, no?
You win there, Brian. When I was a kid, my mom (who passed away in 2010) watched the CBS soaps. IIRC, her favorite was “As The World Turns”. Which left the air in 2010.
My mom was also a big As the World Turns fan, so yeah, growing up I knew all the various plotlines of the show, and that show was particularly known for keeping characters around for decades, so I could ask her years later about characters I remembered as a kid and they’d almost all still be around! 🙂 My dad’s mom also watched the show, so that was a little bonding thing between the two of them.