Pete Rugolo was a composer-arranger for Stan Kenton's orchestra in its late 40s/early '50s heyday, and he went on to produce the epochal Miles Davis Birth of the Cool record.
Call his "Fugitive Theme" the afterbirth of the cool, especially as played by big band disciple Si Zentner (Si also suaves out on Henry Mancini's Mister Lucky theme.)
Neal Hefti wrote red-meat arrangements for the '50s Count Basie ensemble, and it was he as much as anybody who turned the TV theme into the happy hunting ground for former big band employees.
His unadorned swing was nothing if not democratic; not even David McCallum was immune to his charms.
When he wasn't fighting T.H.R.U.S.H. on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., McCallum was conducting orchestras in the studio.
His version of the "Batman" music jumps in a Hefti bag, offering us a slightly more genteel cover than we might expect from either Ilya Kuryakin or the caped crusader.
Among the big band vets, Lalo Schifren is one of the more interesting cases.
Born in Argentina, he proved adept at jazz, and then even adepter at the tropes of soundtrack composing.
Who else would be so wicked-wicked good—as to write the theme song for a macho detective show as a waltz?
But then, that's what the music to Mannix is, and as you one-two-three we suggest you don't step on Mike Connors' toes.
He might get mad.
John Barry was a jazzbo too, a trumpeter for whom no toodling was too strange.
But no big band could contain his free-range mind.
Barry's "The Human Jungle" is the last word in pavement-kissing, tabloid-newspaper side-walk symphonies.
You hear this lurid music and you feel dirty; you hear this music and you wish you lived in Barry's world.
Some TV themes don't ever wash off.
"Style is something you develop by copying the style of someone who writes well," Rod Serling once wrote.
But Serling was a self-deprecating guy for whom little was ever good enough.
It pains us, but here we must disagree with our hero.
Listen to The Ventures twofer of "One Step Beyond" and "The Twilight Zone," and see what style really could be, in the golden age when guitar bands and TV writers made it up as they went.
Style is a chunk of cheese, with a side order of bologna.
Style makes you shut your mouth and gape long into the night.