These posts are about the songs that fell just short of crossing the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

Lalo Schifrin was done with almost all the music he’d been hired to created for the pilot episode of the new Desilu Productions’ series Mission: Impossible. The Argentinian immigrant was a skilled jazz musician and composer who’d been on Dizzy Gillespie’s payroll for a time and had a Grammy on his shelf for his writing efforts found on the Paul Horn album Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts. For a few years, he’d been making a tidy living crafting music for films and television. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, such assignments often entailed providing musical accompaniment for big-screen and small-screen material hoping to replicate the enormous success of the James Bond film franchise that debuted in 1962. Schifrin knew the kind of music a show like Mission: Impossible needed, and he finished the score for the first episode easily enough. All he still needed was the theme for the opening titles.

The show’s producer, Bruce Geller, repeatedly promised that Schifrin would have the completed titled sequence well in advance of his deadline. Geller had already explained the loose concept for the segment’s visuals, emphasizing the use of a lit fuse to emphasize the urgency and danger of the show’s espionage adventures. Whenever Schifrin asked about the finished sequence, he was told it was on the way.

“I kept working on the background music until I was finished, now I was ready for the ‘Main Title,'” Schifrin later recalled. “I said to Bruce, ‘I don’t have anything else to do and we are scoring next week.’ He said, ‘I have bad news. We rejected what the graphics company was doing, l didn’t like it. So you’ll have to score to nothing on the screen. Give me something very exciting; give me something really light, not like the background music which is really serious. Make it a little bit tongue in cheek, something very exciting with a lot of rhythm, vigor, but don’t make it too serious. Give me something rhythmically exciting.”

What could have been frustrating was instead freeing for Schifrin. Largely unconfined by the flickering images before him and with the barest of prompts, Schifrin made the music he wanted to hear. The Mission: Impossible theme was in an unusual time signature and took rhythmic inspiration from the Morse code rendering of the initials of the show. It’s energetic and seductive at the same time.

The music Schifrin made for Mission: Impossible immediately earned acclaim. At that year’s Grammy Awards, Schifrin won trophies in the Best Instrumental Theme and Best Original Score Written For A Motion Picture Or A Television Show categories. He was also nominated for Best Instrumental Performance, but lost to Chet Atkins for his handiwork on the album Chet Atkins Picks the Best. Although the Mission: Impossible theme would go on to be one of the most famous TV tunes ever recorded, attempts to make it a pop hit didn’t really work out. Released as a single, it peaked at #41.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.