Meme tag! I'm it.

Qalmlea has tagged me with a meme. PZ Myers started this on Pharyngula a while ago.

Here are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My Ancestors:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My great-great-great-grandparent is Laelaps
My great-great-grandparent is Quintessence of Dust
My great-grandparent is An Evangelical Dialogue On Evolution
My grandparent is Exploring Our Matrix
My parent is Sporadic Maunderings

The Questions (and Answers):

1. The best scary movie in children's movies is:

Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. Hey, it scared the hell out of me when I was seven. To date I still think it's the creepiest movie I've ever seen. The new version with Johnny Depp is mild by comparison (The modern special effects actually make it less creepy).

2. The best song that moves me inexplicably in 80s pop is:

80s pop is the soundtrack to my teenage years. A lot of people are going to lose any respect they may have had for me when I admit this, but I have always found Hatful of Stars by Cyndi Lauper to be incredibly sad.

3. The best adventure story in Historical Fiction is:

The Walking Drum by Louis L'Amour. Really, there's nothing more to say here.

4. The best book appealing to both children and adults in Fantasy is:

This one was hard. I was racking my brain, and I had just about decided to cop out and ditto Quamlea's answer (an excellent choice, but too advanced for younger children, I think) when I remembered a book Mom read to Marie and I when I was 4 or 5, and that I read again myself several times. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I also remember, even as a little kid, being disappointed that the Disney cartoon was basically just the chapter "The Battle for Toad Hall".

5. The most fantastic melody of all time is found in:

Superman, the main title. That melody is really versatile. Just by changing the tempo it can be sad, tense or exciting. John Williams is awesome.

So now I tag Phil, Tom and Jackal. Maybe this will get them to update their blogs.

Cool trivia: The stories and screenplays for Superman and Superman II were written by Mario Puzo, the author of (and screenplay writer for) The Godfather

Later,

UPDATE: I just want to say that I think the best melody [full stop] is In the Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg, but I couldn't fit it to the question.

Later,