Intrada Soundtrack Forum

There have been plenty of threads about holy grail threads, so here's a new challenge. Create a cover for that grail you've been pining away for...either completely unreleased or never got its own album as it was just a few selections on a set. Here are a few to prime the pump:

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Grail: ONE OF OUR DINOSAURS IS MISSING (Ron Goodwin)

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Grail: ONE OF OUR DINOSAURS IS MISSING (Ron Goodwin)

From my Shirley Walker wish-list...









It's possible GHOULIES doesn't belong on this list, since the selections included with Intrada's RE-ANIMATOR release are described as everything Band composed specifically for the film. Walker gets joint credit with Band in the actual film, but I've never attempted to analyze all the tracked and reused music to determine how much (if any) original material remains unreleased. In any event, since the Intrada release didn't include an album cover for GHOULIES, I figured I might as well slip it into this thread.

CHICAGO JOE AND THE SHOWGIRL is a phenomenal score, haunting and decadent. Composer interviews suggest Walker wrote all or most of the material on her own, with Zimmer's screen credit being a legal thing. At any rate, they are co-credited in the film itself, and I imagine that's how it would appear on any official album.

Walker's music for Disney's 1997 LOVE BUG reboot, starring Bruce "The Chin" Campbell (not to be confused with the 2005 Linsay Lohan film) is one of my favorite unreleased scores of the nineties. The theme for the villainous car is just spectacular, especially churning out in the low brass during the final race scenes.

As for MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, a single track has been officially released on various Tokyo DisneySea albums. But Walker actually wrote a good deal of material for the various sections of the theme park attraction -- I don't know the exact figure, but it may be as much as 30 or 40 minutes, by some accounts. What I've heard is amazingly powerful stuff, as you'd expect given the composer and subject matter.

I thought I might make this a little more interesting by providing as to why something hasn't been released. Since I'm catching up I'll just list here:

Damnation Alley -- missing elements
Face of a Fugitive -- missing elements
The Haunting -- missing elements
Starship Invasions -- not aware of any reason. Perhaps no one has looked into it yet
One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing -- we haven't looked into it yet, so perhaps in time
Ghoulies -- you have every note composed for it on the CD
Chicago Joe -- no one's probably looked into it
The Love Bug -- Ditto You have me very curious to check it out though!
Mysterious Island -- Ditto

Thanks, Roger! Here's another one I'd be happy to see someday: Richard Harvey's score for the 1983 spook-fest HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS, a Cannon Group picture most notable for starring horror icons Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine. The film isn't all that scary -- loosely based on SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE, it's more of a parody than a straight thriller -- but the music is macabre fun. No release of any kind that I'm aware of.

These first two images I found online, while the last two I made:



Only 26 minutes released, the score is very clearly much longer than that. Lovely score in the film.



I'll just call this one righting a wrong made in 1995 when that atrocious soundtrack came out full of dialogue over the few cues there were, and then they went and took basically the Dolby Surround (2-channel) mix from the film and pressed it to a 'gold' CD - dialogue and sound effects since it was the audio mix from the film itself.




My Holiest Grail television score. It's for the pilot episode of the short-lived series and was an amazing, beautiful score in the same vein as the more tender, heartfelt music in Independence Day, Godzilla, Last of The Dogmen and Casino Royale. Arnold is obviously LLL territory and this is a big hole in his discography. It was recorded in Air Studios Lyndhurst and was the second to last score Arnold provided the filmmakers behind Independence Day, Stargate and Godzilla, since they created the TV series which was on Fox in September 1997.




Hey, NBC News had John Williams right?
I had made my own 'album' using taped off the TV broadcast recordings and edited them. Obviously I don't ever see a pressed to CD album for this music, but I always believed it would make a perfect digital download album on iTunes. James Horner wrote so many variants on his CBS News theme used for 5 years (2006 to 2011) and it was a great theme. I asked Man Made Music owner Joel Beckerman about what it would take to release it even as a digital album and his only reply was to "talk to the Horner estate". I highly doubt the Brentwood Management Co. would take any inquiry like that seriously from a nobody like me.

Beckerman worked with Horner on making his themes into a real Network News Theme package with bumpers and close outs and intros and the like, beyond the fuller themes he wrote. He seemed like the right guy to ask, but alas...

Two more albums I've been pining for, this time from the great Laurence Rosenthal!





THE AFRICAN ELEPHANT was a 1971 documentary feature, released in some markets as KING ELEPHANT. It's a hard film to find, but the score is magnificent. The song "Rain Falls Anywhere it Wants To," with music by Laurence Rosenthal, lyrics by Alan & Marilyn Bergman and performed by Lovelace Watkins, was released as a vinyl single.

THE DAY CHRIST DIED is a 1980 TV movie inspired by the 1957 book of the same name. It was an interesting attempt to present the Crucifixion narrative in a respectful way, but without overt supernatural elements. Rosenthal's score is typically excellent, with his searing main theme being particularly striking.

While elements for both of these scores exist in the CBS archives at UCLA, my recollection is that they would be expensive and logistically challenging to release. But since this thread is for dreamers...

Here's another. Elements are fine...licensor isn't that interested. Will keep on them, though.

A couple more, and then I'm probably through for a while.





The 1984 TV movie THE MASKS OF DEATH was Peter Cushing's final starring role before his death, returning to a character he loved, Sherlock Holmes. The film boasts one of the few scores by Australian composer Malcolm Williamson, who held the distinguished post of Master of the Queen's Music from 1975 until his death in 2003. His theme for this film was rerecorded in a scaled-down version for a Varese compilation album, but the original tracks were never released. I don't know if the tapes still exist, or where the rights lie. I believe Lorimar, the production company, was acquired by Warner Bros. In any event, it's a fine score to a well-made film.

Georges Delerue's 1966 score for A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS is extremely brief -- even with source music included, it runs a little over 13 minutes. There was an LP set containing music-plus-dialogue, and an isolated music track was included on the Twilight Time Blu-ray. A version of the opening credits appeared on a 2008 Delerue compilation. If the complete score-only tracks are ever released on CD, I expect they would need to be paired with other Delerue work to make a viable album.

P.S. Good call on ROOSTER COGBURN! On the subject of Rosenthal, one could go through the Windemere film and television promo albums that provide a sampling of his long and underrepresented career and come up with a laundry list of titles that merit proper albums. As with Shirley Walker, the list of totally unreleased scores I'd love to have is just too dang long!