TV Theme Composer Reveals ’90s Theme That Fooled Eddie Van Halen

The name Ron Wasserman might not be instantly recognizable, but to many a ’90s kid, his music is. Wasserman composed a number of TV themes over the years, including ones for X-Men: The Animated Series and Sweet Valley High, but perhaps his most well-known composition was the theme for Mighty Morphine Power Rangers. And it’s that last one in which Wasserman revealed he got the “highest compliment” from none other than Eddie Van Halen.

There’s no doubt that the high energy TV theme rocks, with what sounds like driving guitars and some nimble tapping guitar work. But if you thought it was all guitars driving the song, you’d be wrong. And you wouldn’t be the only one who thought that.

While speaking with the Monsters, Magic and Madness YouTube Channel (as seen below), Wasserman revealed his interaction with Eddie Van Halen in which the guitar great asked him how he actually played the song so that he could get it right for his son Wolfgang.

“All that stuff you heard, except for the lead guitar later on, all of it’s done on a keyboard,” Wasserman confirmed, clearing up the common misconception.

“It fooled everybody,” he explained, before sharing his Van Halen anecdote.

“My highest compliment on that is [that] I had a band called Fisher with my ex-wife. And Eddie Van Halen, his wife Valerie Bertinelli was a big fan of the band, so she put one of the songs in a movie she was doing. She said, ‘Come on up to the house,’” he recalls. “So we came up to the house – the estate, the compound! I was talking to Eddie for a bit and he handed me a guitar and he said, ‘I had to learn that damn riff for Wolfie. Show me how you played it!’”

“And I went over to the grand piano and said, ‘Don’t kill me!’ And he said, ‘Alright, good job…’ So I fooled the master. I can’t imagine how it fooled him but it fooled him, so I’m fine with it.”

READ MORE: 10 TV Show Theme Songs That Rock

Wasserman said the now famous theme took him about two and a half hours to complete. “It was just a great night: I just bang the thing out. Then when they said, ‘Fox loves it!’ I asked, ‘Who are we going to get to sing it?’ It was the first thing I ever sang on like that and they said, ‘No, it’s you!’ And that took off a whole new career for me of doing of screaming incorrectly into a microphone,” he adds.

Revisit the Mighty Morphine Power Rangers theme below, then check out more of Wasserman’s interview with Monsters, Madness and Magic below that.

Mighty Morphine Power Rangers Theme

TV Theme Composer Ron Wasserman Speaks With Monsters, Madness and Magic