Please Rise

Photo attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeymikez/ / CC BY 2.0

 

While watching the 2014 Winter Olympics a few weeks ago, I was, as I usually am, struck by how odd a concept national anthems are.  I mean, it’s basically a leitmotif for your country, as if it were a character in a play.  The very notion is really odd, especially on this side of the 20th century.  National anthems are, despite what one might think, a fairly recent phenomenon.  They have their roots in nationalism, a concept that dates back to only the 19th century, and which doesn’t have nearly the same kind of pull now that it did just 30 years ago, in the midst of the Cold War.  Some of the anthems out there are far older than nationalism is, but were usually not written with “become my country’s theme song” in mind.  Some of them, including the American one, started out as drinking songs!

Well, while pondering the strangeness of national anthems as a thing, it suddenly occurred to me that despite the dozens, nay, hundreds of fictional nations I can name off the top of my head from science fiction and fantasy, there are only a handful of anthems that I could think of representing them.  It’s as if all of the creators were deliberately avoiding the subject, for fear of creating too strong a connection with the real world and all of its associated political hangups.  It’s just exceedingly rare to hear an anthem from a fictional nation.  So rare, in fact, that after I made this list of all of the fictional anthems I could think of off the top of my head, when I checked online for any that I was unaware of or had forgotten, I found that I was only missing a handful more, none of them especially memorable.  Let’s take a look at the ones that stuck with me…

 

Animaniacs – “The National Anthem of Anvilania”

Weren’t expecting this one, were you?  Yes, the 1990s children’s television series Animaniacs featured, as the national anthem of an anvil-themed medieval nation state, a parody of the singing style of Perry Como.  Who was last relevant as a singer in the public consciousness circa 1980.  Odd choice there, guys, but whatever.  Even as a kid only vaguely aware of who Como (fittingly styled “Perry Coma” here) was, I found the joke funny, and the “song,” such as it was, absurdistly memorable, something Animaniacs was kind of known for being.  Yes, inexplicably, you will have this stuck in your head for a while.

 

Battlestar Galactica (2003 series) – “The National Anthem of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol”

This was a great idea all around.  Bear McCreary, who composed the modern BSG score in the style of a Japanese war march/Irish folk song, very cleverly brought back the bombastic, Star Wars-style theme Stu Phillips wrote for the original 1970s BSG television series as the anthem of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.  It’s insanely out of place in the exceedingly grimdark reimagined series, which makes it all the better, considering how utterly ridiculous national anthems tend to be in degrees of bombastic-ness and levels of “never mind all the problems, sing about how awesome we are.”

 

Borat – “The National Anthem of Kazakhstan”

The potassium really is impressive.  Arguably, this shouldn’t be on here, since Kazakhstan is a real country, but the version of it from Borat might as well be on the moon for all it has in common with its real life counterpart, so this one gets to be here.  But seriously, all you need to know about this spoof of a Soviet-style anthem is that it was so popular that it was actually accidentally played as the “real” anthem of Kazakhstan when a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal at the 10th Annual Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait in 2012.  Yeah.  That happened.  Try to watch this video without wincing in sympathy.  The really sad part?  Kazakhstan’s actual anthem is really, really good.

 

Caprica – “The National Anthem of Caprica”

Another work from Bear McCready, this one was written as the anthem of the planet Caprica in the BSG prequel series Caprica, which would later become part of the “Twelve Colonies” from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.  There’s really nothing specific to say here except that this is a lovely piece of music, and sounds completely like a 100% real anthem, and a good one, at that.

 

Final Fantasy VIII – “Cactus Jack” (The National Anthem of the Republic of Galbadia)

Nobuo Uematsu is a…  Let’s call him an “interesting” composer, fond of doing completely insane stuff like mixing the musical styles of Jimi Hendrix and Igor Stravinsky.  Best known for composing the music for nine of the fourteen main Final Fantasy video games, he wrote this one for Final Fantasy VIII‘s arrogant, war mongering Republic of Galbadia.  It sounds a bit odd filtered as it is through the old PlayStation’s MIDI synthesizer, but it doesn’t take much imagination to get an idea of what it would have sounded like played by an actual orchestra: like half of the less memorable national anthems from the real world.

 

Follow That Bird – “The Grouch Anthem”

Hehehe…  Somewhere back in 1985, a 5-year-old me is grinning like a cheshire cat.

 

The Hunger Games – “Horn of Plenty” (The National Anthem of Panem)

Arguably the best fictional national anthem I’ve ever heard, James Newton Howard’s “Horn of Plenty” for the futuristic dystopia of Panem, is perfectly fascistic, histrionic, and epic.  And you can’t help but love the anthem, and how incredibly boastful and prideful the lyrics are, even while you hate what it’s celebrating.  Which is kind of the point (see the Soviet Union’s national anthem, which worked so perfectly as an anthem that it was brought back with altered lyrics in 2000 for the modern Russian Federation, despite the unfortunate association with a horribly oppressive regime).

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four – “Oceania ‘Tis for Thee” (The National Anthem of Oceania)

On its face, this is a straightforward national anthem with all of the standard accoutrements of jingoism, over-the-top praise, and borderline silly pride.  Until you read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or watch the 1984 film adaptation this version of the anthem is from, and realize just how utterly insane it is that any song even remotely like this represents Oceania.  A single, icy piano note would probably be more appropriate.  “Blackwhite,” indeed.

 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – “The National Anthem of the United Federation of Planets”

Speaking as a lifelong Star Trek fan, the Federation anthem was something I had wondered about for many, many years.  In my head, I always assumed it would be Jerry Goldsmith’s march from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which later became the Main Theme of Star Trek: The Next Generation), and that the people running the franchise back then might sneak it in without warning during a scene as a kind of treat for the fans.  …Instead, it finally showed up in the 1999 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” played before  a simulated baseball game, of all things, and it ends up being this incredibly drab, generic, lyric-less thing.  Ugh.  What a wasted opportunity, and very typical of the incredibly bland and “safe” Star Trek of the period (which DS9 usually avoided being, but clearly failed here).

 

The Empire Strikes Back – “The Imperial March” (The National Anthem of the Galactic Empire)

Yep.  This is the anthem of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars.  Darth Vader’s theme music, possibly the best-known leitmotif on the planet (which is really saying something coming from King of the Leitmotifs, John Williams), is a national anthem.  While this has never been shown on-screen, it has been very subtly hinted at in several books and video games, which have varying degrees of canonicity.  It was most blatantly hinted at in A.C. Crispin’s “The Paradise Snare,” where the exact tune is referenced as “the martial theme of the Imperial Navy.”  While the theme may sound a bit too “evil” to one’s ears to be believable as something any government would choose as their anthem (“we are the hero of our own story,” after all), there are certainly equally ominous and martial anthems out there in the real world as proof that some governments would.  The powerful, relentless triplet figure that gets into your head and never leaves is probably the best.  Anthem.  EVER.

 

New York, NY
April 7, 2014