[Closed] Now Playing XLVII

This score is being played again right here and now thanks to the power of suggestion (from reading these posts) and pure adoration for one of the finest film scores ever. Just plain brilliant!

I'm at early 80s Goldsmith right now, in fact (just made it through the exciting late 70s) and just about to get to The Final Conflict. Excited!

I'm guessing you were lucky and avoided the earlier releases with piss-poor sound quality.

I had never been so disappointed by a score I wanted so much as when I first got the Varese LP and played it.

"Mission: Impossible" Now and Then


I thought I had tossed this, but I apparently still have it (I tried to trade it away, but nobody ever bit!). I decided to give it a re-evaluation. It has been probably ten years since I popped it in. I remember being disappointed. But I thought, surely I must be wrong about Schifrin's efforts on the disc.


The old GNP Records CD opens with the original theme, but the tape source is close to abysmol. It's like the track goes from stereo (or fake stereo) sound to mono from the left to the right channel back & forth the whole time to an unheard beat. You can litterally find clips of the theme on Youtube not just miles above this, but light years above it. It's bad. You litterally could have gotten a better recording of it with a tape recorder held to the TV speaker back then, and put that on CD.


Anyway, passed that ware selected cues from a handful of episodes, but only Schifrin's contributions.
Aside from two or three cues I didn't care for (not bad, just not my taste), were get some excellent jazzy '60's/'70's television scoring. I can only hope that GNP does more than just Star Trek TV score remasteres, but also does this and does more scores from the show.


Now we move on to the next part of the disc -- selections from episodes of the 1988 series.

A few months ago I finally got fed up and wanted to know which episodes Ron Jones scored, since there was no listing online, so I found all the episodes loaded and went threw the end credits of all of them and submitted the full composer credits to IMDb, which they took. Three episodes scored by Schifrin, six by Jones, and the rest were done by John E. Davis. Only Davis' contributions are on the GNP disc.

Shocking. Terrible, dated even for that time, syth scores. Not a single track is worth hearing again. Whomever redid the main title, even managed to make it less appealing. Half the disc is garbage, in my opinion. I expected far, far better after a few months ago hearing his one score to "MacGyver". Who ever in production let this go on and kept approving it, really cheapened the show and brought it down notches. No wonder the series only lasted two seasons.


Finally, the disc closes with a suite composed by Schifrin and performed live. It's excellent. I remaster of that would be most welcomed.



However, determined to find out if Jones pulled the same synth garbage out of his hat, I decided to check out an episode on Youtube today (the only one loaded there; the rest were on dailymotion.com). And yes, he did it with synth (almost exclusively), too. There was one nice cue performed with orchestral during a magic show. I suspect he shock it up more than Davis did; I'll have to check out the other five episodes later. And both composers used themes from the original series. Coincidently, worth mentioning, so did Elfman on the first film score.

NP: Predator 2 - Alan Silvestri

One of the highlight releases of the year this one. Great to hear more of Silvestri's powerhouse of a score.

I am finding it a mixed blessing though. There's some great clarity in a lot of the tracks that brings out subtle orchestrations that were drowned out in the original album. But there's also some emphasis of specific parts of the original release (e.g., tribal vocals in tracks such as "Truly Dead") that are toned down in this new version. So, I think that it's worth keeping both versions.

And this version seems to have been mixed very loudly and there's a high level of treble that comes through in the strings making them quite shrill.

But, in saying that, it's a great release.

I think that the pros definitely outweigh the cons. I suppose the loud mix can be taken care of with just turning the sound down and I am sure that the shrillness can be sorted out as well (not sure how I would take care of this when ripping tracks or on ripped tracks).

But, there's a lot of details that are now clear to hear compared with the previous version.

As I mentioned, the original version is definitely worth keeping (and that's partly because it's a version that I've become very accustomed to over the years.

One of my favorite Desplat scores!

NP: Captain Future (1980) - Christian Bruhn

The Japanese jazzy-funky score by YUJI OHNO is also very good, but the CD is expensive so I never aquired it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFopYYfpWaw

Volker

Natassja

Godzilla - Alexandre D

Love it. My favourite of 2014 (so far).

Natassja Kinski Not her father of course.

I can't say that something with such monochromatic emotion is my favorite, but it truly is incredible for what it is, and grew on me a ton.

I don't agree. I think all four composers bring something to the table and each composer's contribution helps round out the score (minus the ambient cues) It's my favourite video game score of the year and has been flip flopping with 5 other scores over the course of the past few weeks for title of best score of the year!

-Erik-