Michael Giacchino at D23: From The Incredibles To Spider-Man: Brand New Day

The D23 panel Disney Music Presents - The Art of the Score, opened with a musical montage of many of the scores that Michael Giacchino has written for films under the Disney umbrella. One gets the distinct impression was that the reason it didn't include all his film scores for Disney was that, if it had, we would have been there all day just watching that.

Few modern film composers have been as prolific as Giacchino, especially considering the work he has done at Disney. At Pixar alone he has scored eight films. It was more than enough to fill a panel at D23 this year where Giacchino sat down with Variety's John Burlingame to discuss his career in music, which started at Disney, though not in the way one might have guessed.

Giacchino's first opportunity to work with Disney was as a cast member in the promotions department. He remembered working on the The Rocketeer back in the 1990s and coming to the rescue when an actor was supposed to play the character for a promotional event. The guy was sick, and unable to attend, so Giacchino donned the jacket and jetpack.

Disney would further Giacchino's career in its own way. His interest in music was known to those he worked with, and his boss at Disney helped him take advantage of a program that had Disney help pay so that he could take night classes in music composition at Julliard.

Giacchino's focus would shift to video games, where he worked on some projects at Disney, primarily as a producer, but occasionally providing some music. But the big change would happen after Giacchino left Disney and moved to Dreamworks. He was working on the video game for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and the team needed some music to go with a game demo being done for Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was so impressed with the music that he suggested Giacchino score the entire game. This would lead to him writing music for Spielberg's Medal of Honor games later. Giacchino was a composer now.

Those Medal of Honor games were played by J.J. Abrams, which led to Abrams reaching out to Michael Giacchino to write music for his TV series' Alias and Lost. The TV work would then open the door to his first feature film composition, and his first work under Disney, The Incredibles with Brad Bird. That would lead to Ratatouille and then Up for Pixar. Those Pixar relationships would then lead to more compositions for live-action movies for Disney when Andrew Stanton directed John Carter and Brad Bird helmed Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland would introduce Giacchino to one of his heroes, Richard Sherman, who co-wrote "It's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" with brother Robert. The Carousel of Progress anthem, would be used in the movie, and Giacchino would even appear in the movie as the ride operator of "It's a Small World" at the New York World's Fair.

Michael Giacchino has even done a Star Wars movie, something few people not named John Williams can claim, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He credits the original trilogy with giving him some of his first lessons in music composition, because the liner notes to the LP of the original film included detailed descriptions of the instrumentation used, allowing him to be able to identify the sounds of different instruments.

Michael Giacchino has scored almost as many Marvel Studios projects as he has anything else, with all four recent Spider-Man, movies under his belt, as well as Doctor Strange, The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the TV special Werewolf by Night, which he also directed. It turns out, however, that those projects only came about after he turned down a pair of Marvel movies. Giacchino says he turned down both Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers. Considering just how big Alan Silvestri's "Avengers Theme" has become, if Giacchino had taken that job, the entire musical identify of the MCU could have been quite different.

Right now Michael Gaicchino's music is being heard by a lot of people thanks to the $2 billion global box office of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Where things go from here, at least on the Disney front, are a little unclear. He's not officially attached to any upcoming projects, although it's a pretty safe bet that he'll score Incredibles 3. It does seem clear that if and when Disney calls, he'll answer.