Fandom and Popular Culture Collection

This study of five of Nintendo’s landmark music scores offers new insights into video game music composition and creativity with limited technology.



Faced with severe technological constraints on system memory, composers of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sought ways to disguise repetition in music that repeats extensively. Their efforts gave rise to a set of compositional techniques for creating the illusion of variety.



Andrew Schartmann distills these techniques into a theory of harmony and form for the analysis of NES music. It then uses this theory to analyze five landmark scores of the NES era: Super Mario Bros., Dragon Warrior, Metroid, Mega Man 2, and Silver Surfer. Both theory and analysis are scaffolded by a detailed description of the NES hardware and its attendant constraints, highlighting the ever-evolving dialogue between technology, commercial demand, and artistic sensibility that characterizes video game music of the 1980s and 1990s.

This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship, these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender, race, and religion in video games.



An original and welcome contribution to the field, it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender, race, and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.



Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings, specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender, race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music, it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music', this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs.



Part I explores immersion, interactivity and interpretation in video game music, proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction, alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality, culture and race, proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion, introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological

meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.

If the Punisher became a valuable piece of intellectual property during the closing decades of the twentieth century, he has become a global icon in the twenty-first. In this pathbreaking study, Kent Worcester explores the sometimes ridiculous and often socially resonate storyverse of the most famous rageaholic in popular culture: Frank Castle, aka the Punisher.



Worcester pays particular attention to nearly five decades' worth of punishment-themed comics and graphic novels published between the 1970s and the present day. These texts provide the material resources for a close reading of the Punisher's distinctive and extreme form of justice discourse. Punishment, after all, is a political and social construct. Violence does not imply or claim legitimacy. Punishment does. To talk about punishment is to ask who deserves to be punished, who decides who deserves to be punished, and what form the punishment should take. All costumed heroes have their political moments; the Punisher is political.



Frank Castle inhabits the most politically engaged corner of the entire Marvel Universe. His adventures should attract our interest for precisely this reason.

Nobuo Uematsu is one of the most influential Japanese composers of the current age. One of Japan’s most beloved living composers, he has been composing music for the popular franchise since 1987, inspiring a new generation of classical music fans, and named by Time Magazine as an ‘innovator’ of the new wave of music.

Sometimes described as the Beethoven of video game music, Nobuo Uematsu has built his career and reputation from his soundtracks to the enduring Final Fantasy series of video games, which are notable for their remarkable cinematic feel.

Classic FM radio describes Nobuo as ‘part John Williams, part Wagnerian leitmotif, part new-age soundscaper – and a legend in his own right’. He has so far appeared five times in the top 20 of the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame, voted for by listeners.

This is the first book-length study on the music of Uematsu. It takes a variety of different analytical approaches to his music. It offers readers interested in ludomusicology (the study of and research into video game music) a variety of ways in which to understand Uematsu’s compositional process and the role that video game music has in the overall gaming experience.

Those interested in Uematsu’s music will gain a greater appreciation and understanding of his compositional processes and his interaction with musical narrative, and those interested in ludomusicology in general will be shown various methodologies that can be applied to a single composer. Those interested in composing for video games or movies will also be given insight into how they might compose for a narrative themselves.

Professional musicians will gain deeper insight into the music from selected games in the series, as each chapter applies traditional theoretical and musicological methodologies to selected games from the series. It my also be a useful educational resource for use in their own studies by student and amateur musicians.

Foreword by William Gibbons, associate professor of musicology at Texas Christian University. Editor Richard Anatone is a professor of music theory at Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland.

It will be a valuable resource for ludomusicologists, as well as academics from a variety of disciplines who work in popular music and culture, film and visual media, and subjects traditionally marginalized by the Western 'Classical' canon. It will also be of interest to fans of the Final Fantasy series, both inside and outside of academia and to composers of video game music.

It will also appeal to readers interested in the business and marketing side of the video game industry, and who want to learn from the successes of live video game concerts and how symbolism and thematic interplay aids in drawing gamers’ attention to soundtracks and concerts of video game music.

Game developers will learn how to recognize potential composers and compositional approaches that will aid in storytelling, fandom and gamer immersion.

General video game historians who want to learn more about Square’s early years and eventual transition into a powerhouse development company will also find much to interest them.

While there have been several edited collections in the subdiscipline of ludomusicology, this is the first book to address a composer’s oeuvre as the main subject. It brings together a variety of methodologies and voices on the subject, and has potential to become a model for future composer-focused studies.

This book, the first multi-disciplinary study of nostalgia and videogame music, allows readers to understand the relationships and memories they often form around games, and music is central to this process. The quest into the past begins with this book, a map that leads to the intersection between nostalgia and videogame music.

Informed by research on musicology and memory as well as practices of gaming culture the edited volume discusses different forms of nostalgia, how video games display their relation to those and in what ways theoretically self-conscious positions can be found in games. The perspectives of the new discipline ludmusicology provide the broader framework for this project. 

This significant new book focuses on an important topic that has not been sufficiently addressed in the field and is clear in its contribution to ludomusicology.

An important scholarly addition to the field of ludomusicology, with potential appeal to undergraduate and graduate scholars in many related fields due to its inherent interdisciplinarity, including musicology more broadly, game studies and games design, film studies, as well as cultural and media studies. It could also appeal to practitioners, particularly those nostalgic and self-reflexive artists who already engage in nostalgic practice (chiptune musicians, for instance). Also to those researching and studying in the fields of memory studies and cultural studies.

Readership will include researchers, educators, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, fans and game players.

In 2017, twenty-five years after its initial release, a new season of Twin Peaks shook the world of television.

This new book is a detailed analysis of the third season of the television series and aims to elucidate some of the meanings of Twin Peaks: The Return and explain these in terms of philosophical, mythological and spiritual approaches.  It focuses on the third season of Twin Peaks but also refers to the first two seasons, and to the film, Fire Walk with Me.

Divided into three sections, the book first examines the third season as expanded storytelling through the lens of Gene Youngblood's theory of synesthetic cinema, intertextuality, integrationist, and segregationist approaches in the realm of fiction, and focuses on the role of audio and visual superimpositions in The Return. It goes on to question the nature of the reality depicted in the seasons via scientific approaches, such as electromagnetism, time theory, and multiverses. The third and final section aims to transcend this vision by exploring the role of theosophy, the occult, and other spiritual sources.

The author’s focus on the role of spirituality and science in Twin Peaks is what distinguishes this book from other works on the famous television series. The work of a scholar who is also a fan, the book should appeal to any hard-core Twin Peaks viewer.  

Foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz, editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com, and the television critic for New York magazine.

This will be essential reading for fans of Twin Peaks and academics writing about it.

Also of interest for students with an interest in philosophy, religion, science or spiritualism in visual and popular culture.

Some 22 years after its creation, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still held in high critical regard as one of the finest examples of the video game medium. The same is true of the game’s music, whose superlative reception continues to be evident, whether in the context of the game or in orchestral concerts and recordings of the game’s music.

Given music’s well-established significance for the video game form, it is no coincidence that music is placed at the forefront of this most lauded and loved of games. In Ocarina of Time, music connects and unifies all aspects of the game, from the narrative conceit to the interactive mechanics, from the characters to the virtual worlds, and even into the activity of legions of fans and gamers, who play, replay and reconfigure the music in an enduring cultural site that has Ocarina of Time at its centre. As video game music studies begins to mature into a coherent field, it is now possible to take the theoretical apparatus and critical approaches that have been developed in antecedent scholarship and put these into practice in the context of an extended concrete game example.

The most extensive investigation into the music of a single game yet undertaken, this book serves three important primary purposes: first, it provides a historical-critical account of the music of an important video game text; second, it uses this investigation to explore wider issues in music and media studies (including interactivity, fan cultures, and music and technology); and third, it serves as a model for future in-depth studies of video game music.

When the first Disneyland opened its doors in 1955, it reinvented the American amusement park and transformed the travel, tourism and entertainment industries forever. Now a global vacation empire, the original park in Anaheim, California, has been joined by massive complexes in Florida, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Spanning six decades, three continents and five distinct cultures, Sabrina Mittermeier presents an interdisciplinary examination of the parks, situating them in their proper historical context and exploring the distinct cultural, social and economic landscapes that defined each one at the time of its construction. She then spotlights the central role of class in the subsequent success or failure of each venture.

The first comparative study of the Disney theme parks, this book closes a significant gap in existing research and is an important new contribution to the field, providing the first discussion of the Disney parks and what they reveal about the cultures they are set in.  There has been a lack of focus on cross- and trans-cultural analyses of theme parks generally and Disney theme parks specifically, until now. 

It is also particularly interesting – and will be welcomed for it – for the non-United States context of the study. This is a thorough examination of all of the existing Disney Parks and how they function within their respective cultures. While Disney themes and characters attempt to be universal, the author does a good job of arguing for where this is not possible and how glocalization is crucial to the parks’ successes. 

The writing is academic, but it is not inaccessible. It will have wide disciplinary appeal within academia, as tourism studies cross into a variety of fields including history, American studies, fandom studies, performance studies and cultural studies.

It will be invaluable to those working in the field of theme park scholarship and the study of Disney theme parks, theme parks in general and related areas like world’s expositions and spaces of the consumer and lifestyle worlds.

It will also be of interest to Disney fans, those who have visited any of the parks or are interested to know more about the parks and their cultural situation and context.

Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier and Dr. Tracey Mollett discuss the cultural histories of Disney's theme parks and fairy tales:

Perhaps no current filmmaker has made more provocative films about American history than Oliver Stone. In this book, Carl Freedman gives a detailed and nuanced account of the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush as fictionalized in Stone’s biographical films JFK, Nixon and W.

Offering detailed historical perspectives alongside careful aesthetic criticism, Freedman explores how Stone uses melodrama, tragedy and farce to transform politics into national mythology. Synthesizing film criticism with political and historical analysis, the book transcends the limitations of formalism and empiricism, reflecting on both Stone’s achievements as a filmmaker and American politics of the past sixty years. 

Oliver Stone’s importance among filmmakers as the major chronicler of recent US history is the starting point for the analysis of his three ‘presidential’ films: JFK, Nixon and W. While not claiming equal artistic merit for Stone’s films, Freedman makes some comparison with Shakespeare’s history plays and draws on T.S. Eliot’s notion of ‘essential history’ to transcend the barren dichotomy of formalism versus empiricism – that is treating historical fiction as either only pure fiction, with nothing to say about real history, or judging it as non-fiction by the extent to which it adheres to superficial historical detail. Instead the focus is on the capacity of Stone’s films to illuminate the structural workings of history, contemporary and general.

Freedman is thoroughly familiar with his subject, and his meticulous attention to historical accuracy and critical attention to the films is impeccable. This book has a powerfully original focus and makes a significant contribution to the field through offering these detailed historical perspectives alongside much more careful aesthetic criticism of the films. It has the potential to become not only a great source on its subject, but a model of how to approach historical fiction in general.

This is an academic study but is written in such an accessible style that it will have genuine appeal to the general reader – to anyone with an interest in cinema, politics and recent history. Wide-ranging, accessible and highly original, American Presidents combines erudition and complex analysis with jargon-free writing and is sure to engage anyone interested in the intersection of American politics and cinema.

The academic readership will be among humanities scholars and students of film, popular culture, media, politics, political history and modern history. It will be highly relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying film or modern American history and culture.

Radical Mainstream examines independent film and video cultures in Britain from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s in the context of struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and homophobia, examining relations between counterpublics and social change. The book considers this period in order to examine the capacity for radical discourse to affect dominant cultural media forms, arguing that independent film- and video-makers helped transform television into a vital site of counterpublic discourse.

The end of the twentieth century saw the development of new social models of film and video production and exhibition alongside the formation of new alliances to campaign for changes to social practice, policy and legislature. Radical Mainstream explores the interrelation between public debate, institutions and individuals, arguing that independent film and video in Britain at this time – including activist documentary, currents of counter-cinema, avant-garde film and video art – were largely concerned with creating and circulating counterpublic discourses. The book traces the diversity of the influences on independent film and video, from socialist and liberation movements to popular radical histories and psychoanalytic and Marxist film theory. The account provides a historic backdrop to contemporary documentary and moving image work, and illuminates the heritage of critical thinking within such practices.