The soundtrack labels are diving deep and getting ready for action with the latest round of releases.
Not to wear out the gag, but I sense something of a sea change in the lastest soundtracks – perhaps it’s a sign of the times, of businesses having to be a little less spendy, but I’ll state up front that both of La-La Land Records’ latest CD releases are being pressed in a print run of only 1,000 copies, whereas just a few years ago a run of 3,000 copies was the norm. The implication of that is that some of these will be going out of print faster than they have in the past.
But hey, enough treading water on non-musical matters. The first of these titles is a magnificent four-CD box set of music from Irwin Allen’s 1960s television series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, and Allen lined up a star-studded array of musical talent to provide accompaniment for the Seaview’s journeys, including Jerry Goldsmith, Alexander Courage, Nelson Riddle, Leith Stevens, Robert Drasnin, Joseph Mullendore, Paul Sawtell, Herman Stein, and Lennie Hayton – all of them represented on this set. Goldsmith’s main theme is here in all of its forms: opening credits, end credits, commercial break bumpers, and even some fascinating alternate versions that have never been heard by the public until now. Episode scores included on the set are Eleven Days To Zero (Sawtell), Jonah And The Whale (Goldsmith), Time Bomb (Stevens), …And Five Of Us Are Left (Hayton), The Cyborg (Courage), Escape From Venice (Riddle), The Left-Handed Man (Stevens), The X Factor (Stevens), The Monster From Outer Space (Hayton & Stein), The Wax Man (Drasnin), A Time To Die (Stevens), Blow Up (Stevens), The Return Of Blackbeard (Mullendore), and Man-Beast (Stevens), with shorter selections of highlights from Monster From The Inferno (Stevens) and The Lost Bomb (Courage). As with other TV from this period (Star Trek is a prime example of this), these episode scores were sliced-and-diced into mix ‘n’ match soundtracks for the episodes that came after them, so the box set provides you with a hefty chunk of the show’s music library for just sixty bucks.
La-La Land is also rolling out a long-overdue complete score release for the 1993 Sharon Stone thriller Sliver, with music by Howard Shore (later famous for the Lord Of The Rings trilogy) and additional music by Christopher Young. That “additional music by…” credit can sometimes be a barrier to getting a complete score releases, as some composers’ egos (though, thankfully, not Mr. Shore’s) dictate that only their material winds up on a disc.
As previewed the last time the Score Keeper crept from his crypt, Intrada has now released the soundtrack from 1958’s WWII spectacular The Young Lions, presenting the complete Oscar-nominated score by Hugo Friedhofer. Both discs of this two-CD set are devoted in their entirety to music from that feature, with the first disc containing the complete score, and the second providing a remastered edition of the original LP release (which, as is often the case for older album releases, utilized different recordings and arrangements than the ones used in the movie itself). In this case, the music for the movie’s rousing finale was very different on record than it was in the movie itself! Also presented on disc two is a suite of “source music” – music that can be heard from on-screen sources such as radios, jukeboxes, and the like, which doesn’t always make it to the record either.
Over at Silva Screen Records, a delightful release from another blast from the genre TV past is getting ready to rocket out of the silo, as Thunderbirds gets a remastered, expanded CD release – and yes, this is the original Thunderbirds music by the great Barry Gray, as in one of the peaks of the Gerry Anderson-spawned art-form-unto-itself that was Supermarionation. (A more recent revival of Thunderbirds has also had music released by Silva, so I thought it was worth pointing out.) There is no pre-order link for this release yet, but it’ll be landing on July 17th in three forms – digital download, CD, and vinyl.
Back to La-La Land Records momentarily: some out-of-stock titles have been replenished, so I thought I’d draw attention to a personal favorite of mine: 2016’s Star Trek: 50th Anniversary Collection. Now, it’s true, I’m a sucker for music from any particular generation of Star Trek that you care to pour into my ears like a big bowl of Ceti eels, but the track listing on this is amazing, spanning freshly-remastered highlights from the original series that didn’t make it onto La-La Land’s legendary 15-disc box set of that show’s music library, to previously unheard Next Generation music, to much-requested highlights from Star Tek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager, to obscure delights such as the production library music track used in the “next week’s exciting all-new episode!” trailers for Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the real draw here is the second disc, which presents – for the first time ever on CD – the complete music library from Filmation’s Star Trek: The Animated Series, which Filmation used relentlessly for later shows such as Jason Of Star Command (partly because the music was that good – and they already owned it!).
Until next time, stay safe, stay sane, stay home if you can, and happy listening.
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