Bless You

Following their groovy score for 1970's forgotten R.P.M., Barry DeVorzon (future composer of The Warriors and Dillinger) and Perry Botkin, Jr. got the plum scoring assigment for Bless the Beasts & Children, Stanley Kramer's impassioned statement about animal killing that's probably the closest American cinema has ever come to an Italian mondo film (for the whole family, natch). The film stars Billy Mumy from The Twilight Zone in this tale about a bunch of boys who run away from summer camp and wind up wrangling with a bunch of buffalo killers, complete with a theme song by The Carpenters. Perhaps more famously, the melodic track "Cotton's Dream" was appropriated two years later as the famous theme song for the TV soap opera, The Young and the Restless.