When the Iranians took the Embassy hostage in 1979, ABC was quick to add a post-nightly news program, "The Iranian Hostage Crisis: Day Blah-Blah.' Eventually, this morphed into its nightly late-night TV program, "Night Line." Until it was taken off the air just a short while ago, whenever I heard the familiar intro tune (duh-duh-duhduh) I couldn't help but mutter to anyone nearby, "Ah, hostage music."
My children, born in the late 1980s, used to think I was nuts. Now they've lived to see it develop for themselves and they realize it wasn't their old man who is nuts, but the programmers who seek to manipulate us all who should truly be the asylum candidates.
(An aside: In the early 80s, while pursuing one of my degrees, I did a paper on how the Iranians manipulated our media to such effect back during the "hostage crisis." I remember I illustrated the title page with a political cartoon that showed the Ayatollah Khomeini playing with an American television crew like they were marionettes, blithely pulling their strings and making them dance to his tune. Beneath that was a quote: "The Ayatollah has the world by its networks." There was a lot of truth in those two simple elements. . )