Well in the past year I’ve written nada for this site. Sometimes we fall into a backslide and have to remind ourselves that’s okay. And sometimes we have to extra remind ourselves that’s only one less than last year. I gotta be better lol

As it is, unbelievably, we are back for our 9th year doing these brackets. Time flies, y’all! In our 8th year we voted for our favorite commercial jingle of all time with the Toys ‘R’ Us jingle “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” coming out victorious, joining 7th year bracket which found our favorite Disney song with Aladdin‘s “Friend Like Me” coming out victorious by one vote! These winners join our group of champions with 6th year Champ – our favorite holiday movie Elf. 5th year Champion of our favorite fast-food joint was one of our closer finals matchups as Whataburger was crowned. Our fourth-year winner of favorite TV theme song was won in a rout by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This joins our third-year winner for favorite breakfast food: Breakfast Tacos and Burritos. Our second-year bracket crowned The Sandlot as our champions of the Best Sports Movie Bracket. Our first champion was in the music bracket where The Beatles reigned victorious. It’s my pleasure to announce our topic this year: Fictional Band Songs.

Before we get started I wanted to do something I’ve never done before and honestly feel a little awkward about but here goes. We’ve done this for almost a decade now and the cost of the hosting sites is going up like crazy. If you enjoy what we do here and feel so inclined to throw a couple dollarbucks my way to help pay for the sites and whatnot, feel free to Venmo me @ josh-sorensen-5 or PayPal @ JoshSorensen5 (apparently there are 4 other Josh Sorensens on both apps that beat me to the punch lol). I truly do appreciate all you people and have loved doing this for all these years. Please don’t think I’m doing anything here but begging haha. Anyway, back to the stuff that we all care about!

We do a lot of music on this here blog and that’s going to change next year, but this one could not wait. This year’s topic came up when a back-to-back beauty from Spotify gave me Brie Larson singing “Black Sheep” in Scott Pilgrim vs The World followed by one of the most perfect cameos ever as Matt Damon of all people belts out “Scotty Doesn’t Know” from Eurotrip.

In quick order, Mrs. Clumsy Optimist and I had rattled off 12 or 13 of the seeds you will see in this bracket. Which is the best? Which song from a fictional band will reign above all? That is for all of you to decide.

A few notes on how we decided what would qualify. From a top level, we tried to stick to original songs from movies (we ended up having to add TV in one region to fill out the whole 64 team bracket) that were performed by a band or solo artist that was/were characters in the film/show. For the most part we really tried to only have original performances and not just songs from musicals or soundtrack pieces, which cut down the list dramatically – a couple of these were left in to complete the bracket but their seeding was lowered from where I probably would have placed them for not exclusively meeting the criteria. There’s about four decades worth of different media represented in this bracket and overall, we’re pretty proud of it.

I’d recommend clicking on every single one of these YouTube links. There are some of these songs that may not be as well known as the others but, I’m telling you, there is some gold in there!

Like previous years, “scores” will be posted as the percentages from the polls.

I’ll set up polls in each round. To keep from completely swamping everyone’s Facebook and Twitter timelines, I’ll post the polls here and put a link up at the start of each new round on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. *Shameless plug* Give me a follow!

We had more of a difficult time coming up with 64 songs than I thought we would considering how quickly we thought of our first 15. Typically we end up cutting almost 20 spots to get to the final regions, but this year we only made 9 cuts. Some didn’t quite fit our definitions and were left out and others just barely got beat out. There’s gotta be some bubble teams, right?

I’m sure there are going to be quite a few issues taken with how I ended up seeding some of these songs, but I think where we landed was as good as it was going to get. We tried to limit it to one song per band and only one per movie if possible but some were just too difficult to cut – in this case a ton of them are going up against each other in the Round of 64. There are going to be some great songs knocked out by their siblings right away. We did make cuts to hold it to 2 per movie at max. If you are curious, here are the first 9 out (all of these were worthy of the bracket I think) but cuts have to be made. I put our reasoning for the cuts in parentheses.

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“The Clap” – Get Him to the Greek (This one was just beat out by the other Aldous Snow hit “African Child (Trapped in Me)”

“Bum Biddy” – Eight Crazy Nights (Cut in favor of “Technical Foul” which fit the criteria a touch better, even if not perfectly)

“Mona Lisa” – Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Just a phenomenal addition that was the weakest of three songs considered from this beautiful monstrosity of a movie)

“What Would Brian Boitano Do?” – South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut (I love this song so much. But it also fell victim to being the last of three spots from the South Park movie and had to be cut)

“On A Roll” – Black Mirror (Ashley O) (This Miley joint from Black Mirror very well could have been added to the Solo Region but room just fell short)

“Phoebe’s Holiday Song” – Friends (This one is great but stood no chance against the behemoth that is “Smelly Cat”)

“Give It Up” – Victorious (A baby Ariana Grande going off, but this one just fell short. Honestly, idk, these Nickelodeon/Disney type shows were definitely picked and seeded by me missus)

“The Best of Both Worlds” – Hannah Montana (See above. This one wasn’t as good as some others I’m told)

“Forever” – Full House (Okay, we recently revisited Full House and this song 100% should be on here and seeded fairly high, but it is a cover of a Beach Boys song so it was unfortunately disqualified)

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Typically we have tried to make our regions have something in common and this year we were able to more or less get things grouped in a way that makes sense and avoid the dreaded “Miscellaneous” Region. This year our regions will be Rockstar, Cartoon/Kid, Solo, and TV. Once again, seeding is almost entirely based on my biases so if you don’t like it, take it up with management. Oh, btw, I’m also management.

The first round of voting will start today Thursday, March 21 and voting will close Sunday, March 24 at 5pm. The second round will begin on Monday, March 25. I will do my best to get the new write-ups and brackets posted as soon as possible but I make no promises. Especially early on, these posts are hella long. New rounds will begin on Mondays and Thursdays. I will set the polls to only allow one vote but in case I miss that checkbox on a couple of these, please only vote once per match-up.

Note that this first round is massive so I will post each region’s polls separately because the page doesn’t like loading 64 YouTube previews at once. Links to each region’s votes are below the bracket and will be posted as individual posts on the homepage. We should only have to do it this way for the first round but please let me know if y’all have problems loading the Round of 32 when that gets posted. Let’s get to voting!

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Rockstar Region

Click here for the Rockstar Region voting page

Cartoon/Kid Region

Click here for the Cartoon/Kid Region voting page

Solo Region

Click here for the Solo Region voting page

TV Region

Click here for the TV Region voting page

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Well, there we have it! I have tons to say about these match-ups, but I don’t want to push the vote one way or another. I feel like I know how almost all of these lean, but y’all have surprised me on more than an occasion or two! Let’s get to voting and see who gets into the Round of 32!