Seinfeld with Twin Peaks music becomes a completely different show. Jerry Seinfeld’s show about nothing famously almost never received a full-season order after its pilot episode went over poorly with test audiences. But receive an order it finally did, and in 1990 Seinfeld’s abbreviated season 1 launched the show on its path to becoming one of the biggest sitcoms of all-time.
But 1990 was of course not only the year of Seinfeld, it was also the year of Twin Peaks. Co-created by famed surrealist director David Lynch, the bizarre ABC mystery series set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest had the whole world buzzing during its two-month season 1 run. “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” was the question on everyone’s lips at the time – though hardcore Twin Peaks fans know that the show was always about a lot more than just the murder-mystery that launched the plot.
Now at last the world of these two groundbreaking shows has been brought together, and the result is suitably strange. Posted to Twitter by @DuganAmanda, Seinfeld with Twin Peaks music takes what was a fairly typical comedic exchange between Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer (from the season 3 episode "The Tape") and turns it into something melodramatic and sinister – and even more cringey than was intended. See the clip in the space below:
The particular Angelo Badalamenti piece used in the above clip is of course one Twin Peaks fans are very familiar with, as it played repeatedly on the show, always during incredibly dramatic and emotional moments. The song is so over-the-top in its lushly escalating, darkly romantic sound that it actually pushes every moment it underscores to the verge of self-parody – which of course was the entire point. And the above video indeed shows the effectiveness of this particular musical piece by transforming a comedy scene into something that feels filled not with humor but harrowing revelation and more than a little creepiness.
The dramatic change in tone created by overlaying a fairly typical Seinfeld scene with completely wrong music indeed proves again the power that score has to totally alter the feel of such a moment. Obviously Seinfeld would not work in the long-run with that kind of music heightening the dramatic tension of every scene, but for a few minutes it’s fun to see how Jerry and the gang’s interplay comes off with entirely inappropriate music playing. This particular moment is of course already sort of creepy to begin with, as it involves Elaine leaving an erotic message on Jerry’s tape recorder, a simple prank that leads to typically unexpected and hilarious consequences. Making Seinfeld creepier doesn’t help the comedy land any better, but it’s a fun experiment that maybe reveals something uncomfortable about Seinfeld and Larry David’s particular brand of humor.
Source: @DuganAmanda/Twitter