My brother Merrick emailed me yesterday to say that he had the $10,000 Pyramid theme running through his head and thought of me. Maybe that doesn’t seem worthy of an email, but we’re close. I replied that his earworm was probably not the $10K theme but the more famous $25,000 Pyramid theme. Yes, there is a difference.

Here’s the $10K theme, called “Tuning Up.”

Unless you’re above a certain age or an inveterate game-show buff, this is probably a first-time listen for you. The roots of the more famous $25K theme (which would debut on The New $25,000 Pyramid) are there, but these were clearly groovier times.

Despite the song’s title, the full “tuning up” section was usually clipped on air, as the producers wanted to get to the brass section more quickly. This is a phenomenal theme. Its loose swagger doesn’t sound like a game show at all, yet it set the right tone for a word game that, without the right presentation, could have been clumsy and boring (as the Donny Osmond-hosted version demonstrated).

After I sent him the MP3, Merrick made the $10K theme his ringtone. It’s a great tune, and it will serve as a thought-provoking conversation starter when his phone rings among friends, but I maintain that the $25K theme is the best game-show theme ever. It brought the Pyramid shows in its heyday of the 1980s, and its catchy brass fanfare is the ideal punctuation to a jackpot win. Plus, it has a secret!

The secret is the laid-back 30-second stretch at the end. It was rare that the bass solo in the latter half of the song would make it to air during the credits roll. So the theme has a second “verse” that was unjustly withheld from Pyramid’s loyal viewers for years.

You were probably expecting that the secret was something sinister, like if you play the theme backwards, you can hear the words “Dick Clark is a robot,” but that’s not the case. OR IS IT?

The $10,000 Pyramid theme is available on the album Best of TV Quiz & Game Show Themes, and the $25,000 Pyramid theme is on Classic TV Game Show Themes, both of which I own and love. (Those are Amazon affiliate links, so if you click through and decide to own and love them yourself, I’ll get a little kickback. It’s not much, though. Buy ten copies.)