Keeping Score: ‘Mission: Impossible’ and the countdown to action
With the exception of Tom Cruise, very few things stay consistent across the eight different Mission: Impossible movies. Different team members, different bosses, wildly varying lengths of Ethan Hunt’s hair, the series has undergone many changes from its first film in 1996 to the most recent instalment, The Final Reckoning.
However, through all that turmoil, there was one thing that appeared every single time without fail; one thing that can trace its roots back to before anyone had even heard of Tom Cruise. This is, of course, its iconic theme tune.
Before it was the all-conquering movie series we know today, Mission: Impossible was a TV show. It starred Steven Hill and Peter Greaves as the leaders of the IMF and ran for seven seasons on CBS before being revived in 1988 for a further two seasons on ABC. As with all TV shows, this one needed a theme tune, so the people in charge decided to contact the Argentine-born jazz arranger Lalo Schifrin to see what he could come up with.
Prior to this, Schifrin’s only major credits were scoring a movie called Dark Intruder and working on another espionage-themed show, The Man from UNCLE. He needed inspiration for his new project, so he took a look at its name. Mission: Impossible can be shortened to M: I. Schifrin decided to convert these letters into Morse code, appropriate for a show all about subterfuge and secretive messaging. That’s when he had his brainwave.
When written out in Morse code, an ‘M’ is represented by two dashes and an ‘I’ by two dots. Interpreting a dash as half a beat and a dot as a full one, Schifrin played this pattern out. This is what gives the piece its unusual 5/4 time signature, which the composer likened to a mutant person with five legs. With the base of the theme in place, Schifrin drew on Latin roots to flesh it out, just in time for it to be committed to tape.
Martin Landau, the Oscar-winning actor who played Rollin Hand on the show, was present for the first recording session of ‘Burning Fuse’, which would later be retitled as simply ‘Theme from Mission: Impossible’. “Lalo raised his wand to the musicians and I heard ‘dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da’ for the first time, and it was deafening,” he told The Independent. “Before we could say anything, they had recorded it. I was stunned. It was so perfect. I came out humming that tune.”
The public loved it just as much as Landau did. It reached number 41 on the US Billboard charts, won a Grammy, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2017. Off the back of its success, its creator went on to compose scores for a string of major films, including Cool Land Luke, Enter the Dragon, Dirty Harry, and the Rush Hour series. He was also asked to write music for The Exorcist, but his ideas were so scary, they were never used.
Lalo Schifrin passed away on June 26th, 2025, at 93 years old. This means that he was able to witness his creation grow from a simple piece of light entertainment to the soundtrack of one of the biggest movie franchises of all time. Without him, Mission: Impossible simply would not be what it is today.
