Posted in: Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: Batman Day, danny elfman, entertainment, film, HRL, justice league, Oingo Boingo

Danny Elfman Kicks Off Batman Day As He Works On Justice League

It's Batman Day (or Harley Quinn day, depending on who you ask), and DC kicked it off with a Birthday Wish from the man who wrote the original theme for Batman: The Animated Series, Danny Elfman.

The former frontman for Oingo Boingo made the move from rock start to film composer seamlessly, working on a ton of genre movies and television including the original Flash series, the Simpsons, Wanted, Batman, Beetlejuice, Darkman II, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Scrooged, Edward Scissorhands, The Frightners, Mission Impossible — the list goes on and on and on.

Elfman is back working in the DC Universe working on the upcoming Justice League film, which he mentions in the clip below.

In 1972, Richard Elfman started The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, a musical theater group. The fifteen person band would perform in clown make and do song from the 1890s to the 1950s. But Richard lost interest and passed the band on to his younger brother, Danny, who had just returned from Africa where he had played violin and studied percussion. The band perfomed on and won the Gong Show in 1976, and by 1980 were moving away from cabaret style shows to more pop/rock music. The shift in part was due to Danny becoming enamored with ska and bringing the sound into the group.

They would go on to change the name to just Oingo Boingo and become hugely popular in Los Angeles. They regularly put on a Halloween show that was the hot ticket. Their fame stated to spread, and songs like Dead Man's Party, Weird Science, and many more become hits. The band would eventually just go by Boingo, and by 1995, Elfman was ready to move on to film work.

They performed one last Halloween farewell show, and the band has never performed together since. The closest thing Boingo fans got to a reunion was a song on the Wanted soundtrack by Elfman called 'Little Things' that captured the band's unique sound.

And, though his work on film is brilliant, anyone who saw them perform live is still hoping, 22 years later, that the band will get back together for another Halloween show — just one.

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