The classic song that Quentin Tarantino has a writing credit for
The soundtrack is so important to Quentin Tarantino that his name can be used to define a music genre. Tarantino’s signature sound isn’t a typical genre like country or indie, it’s some swaggering amorphous beast united by an air of pure atmosphere. In other words, you know a track touched with an aura of Tarantino coolified drama when you hear it. They tend to be songs that you can imagine topless cars cruising to, blood splattering in saturated tones and matinee idol figures rolling a cigarette.
As he once declared of his own process, “I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie.” It’s an awful word but, in this case, an unavoidable one: he captures a ‘vibe’. This vibe is one that inspired many songwriters when he first burst onto the scene with the likes of Pulp Fiction.
One of these bands was the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. In the obverse of Tarantino’s own technique, the band’s Brian ‘Fast’ Leiser watched movies while he was making his music. So, while he was watching the best new auteur’s latest movies, he took sizeable inspiration from Tarantino and then some when it comes to their 1996 hit ‘Scooby Snacks’.
“I remember having the Reservoir Dogs LaserDisc playing while I was messing with this groove that was just drumbeats and that simple bassline,” Leiser told Songwriting in 2021. “It sounded cool having this dialogue from Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi. The original song had nothing but dialogue from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. When I sent it to Huey [Morgan, frontman] he was like, ‘That’s the hit! But you need to lose some of the dialogue so I can put lyrics on it.'”
Morgan, likewise, decided to be cinematic in his approach to the lyrics. He crafted his own Tarantino-esque story about bank robbers on drugs popping ‘Scooby Snacks’ to keep their cool. Without sounding like a broken record, this too, had Tarantino ties in that Morgan took an uncanny tale from reality that he was privy to and wove it into surreal fiction. Morgan knew of a bouncer who handed the rowdier drunks in New York’s The Tunnel valium to snack on when they were pushing things too far.
“There were fights and people trying to sneak weapons in, guns and knives, so the security guards were always on edge,” Leiser recalled. “One of the guards was a crazy dude and he’d be giving everyone Valiums so at least they were all chilled out. He’d hand them around and say, ‘Does anyone want a scooby snack?’ That’s where got the idea for the chorus from: what if this dude and some of his meathead friends were robbing banks, all high on these scooby snacks?”
So, throughout the process, the world of Tarantino was a central tenet. Thus, it only seemed right that his soundbites remained when Morgan had written the lyrics. This was costly. The director heard the track and made the bargain that he wanted 37% of the song’s royalties for his songwriting credit. While this may well be a pretty secondhand way to go about it, it’s hard to say that Tarantino wasn’t at least a very direct inspiration for the song as he was for a whole era of culture.
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