As Tom Cruise’s spy film franchise is supposedly coming to a close with “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” we uncover secrets of the classic theme song.

Lalo Schifrin, right, with the saxophonist and flutist Leo Wright in about 1960, when they were both members of Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Mr. Schifrin worked as a pianist, composer and arranger ...

Narcissus’s brutal rejection of Echo because of her inability to speak her own words caused her such grief that, in the end, there remained nothing of her except for her voice.

Lalo Schifrin, the composer who wrote the endlessly catchy theme for "Mission: Impossible" and more than 100 other arrangements for film and television, died Thursday.