Balan Wonderworld, a new game from former Sonic Team leaders Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima and published by Square Enix, hasn’t been getting very good critical reception. For my part, I played the demo and bounced off of it, but that’s not why we’re here today. Because now, whispers of allegations of MUSICAL PLAGIARISM have arisen!
GigaBoots, a streamer and YouTuber, posted the Balan Wonderworld track “The Firefighter With Heroic Aspirations: Main Theme” to Twitter on Friday, saying:
They also posted Elmer Bernstein’s “Ghostbusters Theme” for comparison:
Playing the two tracks back to back, it is indeed hilarious – and a little uncanny – how similar they sound. However, is it plagiarism?
Well, according to The Internet, you need two things to prove musical plagiarism: that Balan Wonderworld composer Ryo Yamazaki heard or had access to Elmer Bernstein’s “Ghostbusters” score prior to or during Balan Wonderworld‘s development, and that an average music listener “can tell that one song has been copied from the other.”
That being said, while the two songs sound very similar to start, and it’s hard (but not impossible) to imagine that Yamazaki hadn’t heard “Ghostbusters” before, it isn’t immediately apparent to me that “The Firefighter With Heroic Aspirations” is a straight rip-off. And while I’m no musical genius, I can absolutely tell that the two songs are in different keys, use different notes from each other and progress rather differently across the board. Whatever similarity they share basically ends within the first few seconds.
On a kinda related note, I found out that people have been accusing Yoko Kanno and Seatbelts of plagiarism on the “Cowboy Bebop” score, which is… baffling to me. The video I’m linking below, by jazz pianist and YouTuber Charles Cornell, gets into those accusations and the general tomfoolery of musical plagiarism accusations more generally (at 5:36):
Will Sony Music go after Yamazaki, Balan Company or Square Enix on the estate of Elmer Bernstein’s behalf? I mean, fuck, anything is possible. I certainly have no special insight here, but I do think that if that happens, they’d have a rough go of proving plagiarism in this case.
H/t to Mallow in my close-friends-only discord for showing this to me this morning. It’s good shit lmao