The SciFi Channel hosts some old, public domain science fiction and horror movies on their site, and it got me thinking. In particular, as the headline suggests, I know way too much about The Giant Gila Monster, a nearly 60-year old B-grade drive-in pic from the featuring kids in dragworthy roadsters facing down a superimposed lizard.

Good stuff, I grant you. But the ownership of the movie has long since expired and, like It’s A Wonderful Life in the 1980s, you can find copies of it everywhere. Personally, I own three copies: one Mystery Science Theater 3000 and two DVDs given to me as gifts, part of mega-box sets of bad movies. Now, if The Giant Gila Monster was any good, you’d find it everywhere, much like every station on the planet ran It’s A Wonderful Life multiple times a day before the Paramount consolidated the rights to the flick sometime in the 90s. (Which is why you only see it on TV once a year or so now.)

I’ve also noticed that, much like you can find these public domain flicks all over the Internet and in cheap DVD bins, public domain music is everywhere. In kids toys, especially, where music playing gizmos are so cheap you can add them everywhere.

So, while Julia was still in shiny baby toy land, we had at least three squirming light-up devices that played some variation of Bicycle Built for Two or Greensleeves. When the batteries start to go, you realize why children’s songs are such an effective cliche for horror movies.

I hope, by the next kid, we’ll have progressed as society to where we’re comfortable putting other public domain songs into children’s toys. I want a teddy that plays nothing but Robert Johnson. I want a light-up dohicky that randomly plays Sousa tunes while spinning.

Unlike movies, there is a lot of good music out there to use. Why give the kids The Giant Gila Monster when they can have It’s A Wonderful Life?

I wish I had better links to offer, but I just can’t seem to find a lot of good free music online. The Internet Archive is a good starting place to find public domain stuff, but it is by no means comprehensive.