Hi YanMan. It's no biggie. I always knew assembling this project would invite many opinions on how to go about it. It's cool that people value this music so much.
A lot of my own personal preference went into this release, partly due to my relationship with Basil and talks about this score back when we started our label and partly due to the extensive alterations and continuing changes that were made, noted in the scoring logs and engineering paperwork included with the actual 2" tape masters themselves. A lot of editorial choices were made during post-production which included constant snips of cues, re-editing and whatnot. Some of the changes worked okay and others were just last-minute attempts to fit stuff into newly cut film. Keep in mind, they were still dickering with the idea of mixing the film in Dolby Surround up to the last minute as well, and did in fact mix the first two reels that way to try and convince the producers of the merits. (Action movies presented in stereo by 1982 were reasonably common.) But the powers that be opted for just going with mono prints.
In any case, this album could have been assembled in several different ways and, as with other holy grails, fans have highly personal connections to the music and how they want to enjoy it. I'm just another fan, really. The presentation is pretty much how I wanted to enjoy it with one major exception which, after getting feedback from people, I did relent on: I really wanted to assemble "Riders Of Doom", "Gift Of Fury" and "Wheel Of Pain" as one long sequence, which Basil intended it to be and, in fact, does happen in the movie but many fans knew the MCA album so well and were used to hearing the cues separately that I decided to go that direction.
As to re-creating the kitchen battle, it was an attempt to capture the basic film edits but not do all of the last-minute trims that showed up in the movie where bars were just cut by the film editors after the initial edits and trims were already in place. I wanted to make sure the music still made some sense when it was heard away from the picture.
I was actually tickled that we could include the affected cues without the chorus, as the film did, since those sequences were recorded with orchestra and choir in separate sessions. It gave us all a new feel to otherwise familiar material. Still, all of this really boils down to trying to make the release as musically satisfying as possible first, and editorially authentic where practical after that.
I hope this helps somewhat.
--Doug
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The middle part of "Anvil of Crom" (featuring "The Riddle of Steel" cue, Conan's personal theme, in violin) is NOT there in the film edit of "Defilers". (d-udo, my edit is not quite as good as yours --if that's yours on YouTube -- Can you tell me exactly where you made the "cut"?)
