The Chemical Brothers and Dragon Warrior

A bit of a retroactive Separated at Birth for you today. It’s something I noticed back in April, before I had the ability to easily embed audio files. Indeed, it pre-dates this wordpress site.

This musical similarity concerns the melody of The Chemical Brothers’ My Elastic Eye from their 2002 album Come With Us and the Castle Theme from the NES classic Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest (1986) by composer Koichi Sugiyama.

First, the game music (straight from the ROM): [audio:separated/061127DragonWarrior.mp3]

Now, the Brothers: [audio:separated/061127MyElasticEye.mp3]

Sure, the tempo is faster and the arrangement is different, but what say you: happenstance, inspiration or appropriation?