The Wonders Of The Universe: Music From The Big Finish Space: 1999 Audio Dramas
I’m going to contend that if you have a soundtrack with a track title that is both a plot point of its story, and the title of an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, you know you’re in for a good time. The great news is that there’s a lot more to The Wonders Of The Universe than “Space Madness”. In 2019, Big Finish Productions – purveyors of many fine audio dramas that have been reviewed extensively in theLogBook episode guides – announced that, as part of their ongoing collaboration with Anderson Productions, they would be rebooting legendary ’70s sci-fi drama Space: 1999 as a series of audio dramas, splitting the difference between adapting original TV episodes and brand new stories. This is top-secret Moonbase Alpha encrypted code for “here’s unfettered access to Earl’s wallet”. Naturally, there have been critics of any project that would dare to recast the roles once played by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, and company, but overall the Space: 1999 audio dramas have been well-produced and well-written, offering connecting tissue that shows the writers have been paying careful attention to the original TV series’ weak spots and shoring those up narratively. And, of course, being Big Finish Productions, they’ve commissioned original scores for each one.
That’s where Kraemer, a veteran of such movies as Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher and countless other scoring assignments, comes in. Not just a talented composer, Joe is, deep down, a fan like the rest of us. That gets laid bare in the liner notes, not just where he talks about being a fan of Barry Gray’s original TV scores, but approaching the audio drama scores as if they’re at the same remove from Gray’s work that 1970s animated Star Trek had to be from the live action Star Trek’s scores. When someone makes a reference like that, it’s safe to start chanting “one of us! one of us!” in the background. Without directly, note-for-note quoting Gray’s season one theme, Kraemer manages to still do a stylistic homage to Gray’s despair-laden season one scores. The distinctive sound of Space: 1999’s first year on TV is echoed especially well in the aforementioned “Space Madness”, the first half of “Intentions Revealed”, and “A Chilling Discovery”. There are also some stylistic homages (some of them pretty in-your-face) to John Williams in tracks like “Time Is Running Out” and especially “Eagle One”. But Gray’s music remains the touchstone for most of what’s on this album. (Derek Wadsworth’s funky, near-disco stylings from Space: 1999’s season TV season are not referenced in the selections heard here, other than an orchestral-style rendition of his season two end credits.)
All of this is accomplished with synths and samples that do a reasonable job of mimicking the sound of a large orchestral ensemble, which is something that simply isn’t within the budgetary reach of Big Finish. In some ways, this means there’s actually a “bigger” sound than even the original TV series could have gone for, though the trade-off is that the orchestra is clearly a synthetic one, especially when you’re hearing it away from the dense mix of sound effects and dialogue that normally competes with the music in the mix. The unique demands of an audio drama mean that this music is seldom foregrounded the way it might be on TV, so if an orchestra of sampled instruments strikes you as a shortcoming, keep in mind that in its original (and, it must be said, intended) context, the music is jostling elbows with a dense, world-building layer of sound design. Kraemer’s original themes start to jump out after just a couple of listens, and that’s indicative of the approach of Space: 1999 a la Big Finish overall: it’s the story we already know, but now with more connecting tissue that reinforces the story as an ongoing saga and something less randomly episodic. I recommend both the soundtrack and the audio productions for which it was created.
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- Theme From Space: 1999 (Season One) (2:30)
- Stellar Intrigue (2:26)
- Space Madness (1:56)
- Mysteries In The Dark (2:21)
- Escaping Threats (4:09)
- Scheming and Plotting (2:41)
- Time Is Running Out (2:31)
- The Coldness Of Space (2:18)
- Moonbase Mystery (2:10)
- Aboard Eagle One (3:30)
- Koenig Investigates (3:03)
- Intentions Revealed (4:19)
- Flight Into Peril (2:13)
- The Wonders Of The Universe (2:32)
- A Chilling Discovery (2:49)
- A Fitting End (0:55)
- Theme From Space: 1999 (Season Two) (1:32)
Released by: BSX Records
Release date: May 11, 2023
Total running time: 43:54
This album, remastered and re-released on CD for the first time just a few years ago, represents the first ten years of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, formed in the late 50s to provide the BBC’s television and radio productions with “special sound” through unconventional and electronic recording techniques. Even mentioning the words “BBC Radiophonic Workshop” conjures up the old newspaper clipping about how the Queen herself once responded to a mention of the Workshop by saying “Yes, Doctor Who?” – and indeed, that’s the mental leap that most of us make when the now-defunct outfit is mentioned. This album proves that there was a lot more to the Workshop than that.
with some of the Radiophonic Workshop’s more well-known work and are curious about what they were doing when they weren’t doing Doctor Who. Fans of analog synthesizers and early electronic music will probably enjoy it too. Folks more accustomed to mainstream fare, however, may find that this album is far too disjointed a collection of sounds that are far too strange for their ear.