Capitalization of "the" in "Love Theme From the Godfather"

MusicBrainz Style
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1

This recording is currently titled “Love Theme From the Godfather”, along with most of the track titles in the releases where it appears. However, the corresponding work has “the” capitalized.

I think lowercase “the” looks very odd here, since it is the love theme from “The Godfather” (the movie), not the Godfather (the character). However, given that there are no quotation marks around “The Godfather” in the track title, the style guidelines seem to demand a lowercase “the”.

Maybe we can wiggle out of this by saying that “the” is is not being used as an article here, rather “The Godfather” is a name? :grin:

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If this were printed in an article or something it would be Love Theme From The Godfather, so I would definitely argue for capitalizing “the”.

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3

If The Godfather and Love Theme are titles, I would probably have thought of Love Theme from The Godfather.

4

I thought we capitalized if the preposition was four or more letters

5

Generally we do, but I think there’s little doubt that this The should be capitalised. It’s the theme from The Godfather, that’s the film’s name.

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I was responding to @jesus2099, re: “from”

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Oh. I often lowercase the “from” in such a case too, it just seems much more natural to me to treat this as “Title 1” (from) “Title 2”, but I guess that’s an edge reading of the guideline :stuck_out_tongue:

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8

Thanks, I went ahead and changed it to “Love Theme from The Godfather” in edit #45697543.

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9

I think that if we had rich text formatting for titles, it should be “Love Theme from The Godfather”

In lieu of that, SURIV’s edit works well.

10

I can’t find the style guide, but I believe that for artists, definite articles get capitalized. That is, it’s “Bob Marley & The Wailers”, not “Bob Marley & the Wailers”.
If the same principle applies to titles, then as you say, “The Godfather” is a name and “The” should be capitalized.