by Mario Sanguinet

August 25, 2025

To the casual observer, the name Michael Giacchino might not mean much. They might not even be able to pronounce the last name, (juh-KEE-no, per his admission). But they might be able to hum one of his many compositions.

It’s hard to overstate the influence and omnipresence of Oscar-winner Giacchino’s work in popular culture. That’s what happens when you’ve worked in entertainment for over a quarter century with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

If you can think of it, he’s composed for it.

Video games, such as “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and the “Medal of Honor” series.

Television, some small-time shows like “Alias” and “Lost”.

Movies. Animated features, including “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” and “Up,” for which he won the Academy Award in 2009, as well as live action films, like, “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” “Doctor Strange,” and Star Trek directed by J.J. Abrams.

Amusement park rides, cue the Space Mountain theme. 

And the Marvel Studios Fanfare.

This past July, attendees at UC San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheater were treated to “Michael Giacchino: Exotic Themes for the Silver Screen.” The evening answered the question: What if an Oscar-winning composer rearranged their catalog to sound like tiki bar music with some color commentary before each song? The results were spectacular. 

“I had always wanted to do this over the years,” said Giacchino. “
I thought it’d be really fun to take the music that I worked on and turn it into one of those [exotica] albums.” 

“Because at this point, after 25 years, I’ve worked on a lot of things, so there was plenty of stuff to choose from,” he continued. “So I sort of thought, ‘All right, well, let’s start from the beginning and go through it.’ 
And tonight, I think what we’re doing is sort of a greatest hits kind of thing, and I’ll walk you through some of the stories behind the projects that I worked on.”

The evening was a journey that mapped out Giacchino’s career, from his first project doing the music for a video game with Steven Spielberg’s blessing (“The Lost World: Jurassic Park”) to his most recent work on the latest “Fantastic Four.” All rearranged to emulate the exotica sounds of the 1950s and ‘60s—what most people would think of as tiki bar music.

Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer and writer-director of “Monsters, Inc.,” “Up,” and “Inside Out,” summed it up best right before intermission: “Can we just call out how insane this is? This is the most successful composer in Hollywood, and he says: ‘You know what I want to do? I’m going to rearrange all my stuff in a style that no one’s recorded since 1972 and get some of the best musicians money can buy, to play them in San Diego.’”

This concert differed significantly from others I’ve attended, in the most positive of ways.

‘Fit Check. Giacchino walked on stage in a straw fedora hat and huaraches, while donning a paisley pattern-like suit in colors resembling a highlighter starter pack. The nine members of the band wore yellow Hawaiian-style shirts with white pants. Not exactly what you’d expect from a conductor and his ensemble, but this was an exotica style affair so the sartorial choices were on theme.

Setting the Stage. At the start of the show Giacchino indicated he wouldn’t be conducting, and he didn’t. He spent most of the evening seated on stage right at a table with an Icelandic couple on their honeymoon who had won a drawing. After intermission, the couple joined the rest of the audience. But Giacchino remained at the table onstage, jamming and tapping his feet as he heard the music. 

Story Time. Relieved of his conducting duties Giacchino was free to emcee his own show and he did a masterful job. Throughout the evening he made sure to provide some background or a lighthearted anecdote for nearly each song. 

The commentary summarized his career. Despite working with some of the most renowned directors and producers in the industry, his stories never came off as humble brags or name-drops. 

From how Spielberg gave the go ahead for a live orchestra for the recording of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” to how J. J. Abrams called him because he played “Medal of Honor” and liked the score. To how he began working with the folks at Pixar, starting with Brad Bird in “the Incredibles,” which led to a call from Disney Imagineering to redo the music for Space Mountain. All of this was before intermission, so not even half of his career.

Stage Presence. Giacchino was warm, funny, and relatable. Every time he went on stage to introduce a new song he shared a story that would make the audience laugh. For instance, when talking about “Medal of Honor” he said, “I’m terrible at video games. I still to this day have not even played Medal of Honor, but I’ve scored five of them. I feel like I played it.” 

When he talked about feeling scared at the prospect of scoring a Marvel film, he said, “They had asked me before to work on a couple other things, but I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know, there’s too many characters, I don’t know what I would do with all that. I’m a little afraid. I don’t want to do that.’ 
So when they called me and said, ‘How about Dr. Strange?’ I was like, ‘There’s one person there in it? Great, I’ll do it.’”

Visual Aids. Usually for this kind of experience, it’s a particular film being projected onto the screen or different shots of the orchestra. But for this experience, the visuals were footage of 1950s and ‘60s footage of people traveling to an island, probably Hawaii. 

There were montages of the plane at various stages, as people boarded, as it was flying over the Golden Gate bridge or when it reached the tarmac of its destination. There were visuals of beaches, drives along Oceanside cliffs, and people engaging in tourist-like activities. But the most vexing was a sequence of young “native” children playing together that somehow became a love story.

The Instrumentation. This epitomized less is more. There were only nine musicians on stage. Someone on piano, bass (standup and electric), a marimba, a vibraphone, a guitar, a ukulele, and three people on a range of percussion instruments. Most have worked with Giacchino on nearly every one of his scores.

Given the nature of that night’s exotica musical style, the marimba and vibraphone stole the spotlight a vast majority of the night. A good example would be “Roar!” the end credits sequence for “Cloverfield” and the “Marvel Studios Fanfare,” which typically does not have a solo. 

Still, the ensemble as a whole truly transcended in pieces like, “Enterprising Young Men” from the 2009 J. J. Abrams’ “Star Trek,” “Le Festin” from “Ratatouille,” and the “Spider Man” theme. In these pieces, the instruments could be picked out as individuals, yet heard collectively. It was prodigious.

Overall, this experience was one for the books.

I highly encourage folks to check out Giacchino’s rearrangement of his works: “Exotic Themes for the Silver Screen, Vol. 1” and “Exotic Themes for the Silver Screen, Vol. 2.” You won’t be disappointed. 

For more events at UC San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheater click here. When you go, remember to bring a cushion and a blanket.