'American Dad! Greatest Hits' Release Reveals Two Surprise Fan-Favorite Tracks
'American Dad! Greatest Hits' Release Reveals Two Surprise Fan-Favorite Tracks
Get your review here! It likely won’t get the treatment anywhere else!
I swear, when I said “dip a toe” I wasn’t expecting it to be an incomplete picture. But at least it was mostly complete. American Dad! Greatest Hits released on digital marketplaces Friday, allowing fans to enjoy 19 songs from the 18 seasons of the Fox and TBS animated series created by Seth MacFarlane, Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman. And yes, that’s 19 songs, with two previously unreported alongside the 17 that were.
Since I had given a primer on the 17 other songs on the album previously, it felt fair to do the same for what was unknown at the time. The two songs are two early favorites, season 2’s “We’re Red & We’re Gay” and season 3’s “Ollie North”. The former comes from the episode “Lincoln Lover”, where Stan is invited by the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay constituency of the GOP to see what they’re all about, of which neighbor Greg Corbin (also voiced by MacFarlane) is part. Stan had written a play about Lincoln and a close male friend that had strong but unintended gay undertones and it caught their attention. “We’re Red & We’re Gay” essentially is a confessional as to why they’ll let the leopards eat their faces and what reasons they allow the contradiction to exist. It is the third track on the album.
“Ollie North” comes from “Stanny Slickers 2: The Legend of Ollie's Gold”, when Stan believes Oliver North, a National Security Council staff member under President Ronald Reagan, buried large amounts of gold under the present-day Smith house. Hayley and Steve (whose preceding dialogue isn’t on the track) don’t know who North is, and so the song serves as a Schoolhouse Rock-style lesson about his heavy involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, which involved the illegal sale of weapons to Iran to help foster the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and then use that money to fund the Contra rebels of Nicaragua under the table, as officially it was also illegal. North, at least as portrayed by the song, took the brunt of the fall, though the convictions bestowed were vacated and reversed because it fell under the limited immunity he was granted for testifying. Of course, Stan being the Reagan worshipper he is presents it in a much more heroic context. It is the fourteenth track on the album.
With the album out, I can actually review it, and reviews and recaps haven’t happened a lot here. With American Dad! Greatest Hits you have to set your expectations properly. It is a fantastic collection of great original music from the series’s near 20 years. This is a soundtrack full of 75 second to two minute songs that were clearly crafted to fit the scenes they’re in of episodes that run 22 minutes. There are not bigger songs awaiting you that the episodes only used partially. Which at least makes sense for “Girl You Need A Shot (Of B12)” because it’s presented as a music video even in universe. Why wouldn’t it be the full song in there? You’re not going to get more non-sequiturs than you originally got from “El Perro” when it debuted in “Roy Rogers McFreely”. “Mail Song” is literally just the entire 16 seconds it was. If you thought the “Stelio Kontos” theme was going to have self-aggrandizing stanzas to complement the chanting of his name that is the song’s skeleton, you're out of luck. You can see it also when Simple Plan released the What’s New Scooby-Doo? theme as a single in 2021, having already incorporated it into their concert setlists for a while at that point. In neither manner had they introduced previously unheard verses.It’s a very understandable lack of foresight. Nobody could have expected these songs to have ended up getting commercially released, or in the Scooby-Doo example, ballooned in popularity and appreciation, 10-20 years after they first aired.
The removal of purely spoken lines, like from “We’re Red & We’re Gay” and most prominently weaved into the play of the “Stelio Kontos Theme” is also understandable, as it’s the pure songs being played here, not the scenes. However, it is the show’s first song, its very theme song, that is the most egregiously built. This five-line, 30-second song is given a full minute and a half on the soundtrack. A 40-second instrumental solo is sandwiched by twin plays of the song. The second play doesn’t even lay the season 4-onward version with Roger’s “Good morning USA!” utterance and yelp at being hid. It is the most confusing, baffling decision.
Even so, the album is still fun to have, containing as many as six songs more than was originally reported in July. It’s available now on digital platforms. The new season of American Dad! premieres on TBS tomorrow and will continue airing Mondays at 10 PM. It is sure to bring at least some more musical numbers to add to the library, songs that will probably be made available on YouTube in official and unofficial capacities for years to come. The show’s future at this point is unclear, as the last renewal the show had was in 2021, before the Discovery regime took over and attempted to get out of their obligations to the order. Hopefully we don’t have to say goodbye in 2025.
