Richard Penna

I can picture the legal people having a dicussion over that and poring over the AFM's agreements. I wonder if the language used just assumes that an 'initial' release of a score has (a) happened and (b) at the time of the film.

Damn, I forgot about the fees. Huge orchestra and choir - that's not coming cheap either way. The Elfman thing is something I hope is in the distant past - I'm fairly sure it's down to him getting the rights to his themes after being messed around on Spidey 2, and iirc there were suggestions back then that Young could do an album if he edited out all of Elfman's material.

Yep, Doc Ock's theme is really good - works great in action mode. I only have a few tracks from the first score (so I was never going to bother with LLL's set) but I might be interested in #2 if they managed to include the rescores by Debney (and whoever else). I was never crazy about the OST, but an opportunity to revisit and make a custom playlist from all the material recorded for the film, would be interesting. And this leads to further ponderings.... if LLL is about to announce this next week, could Spidey 3 possibly be on the table? Probably the only score other than JPIII/Gladiator that would make me properly thrilled.

Rings of Power.

Woah! I noticed this yesterday amongst my other earlier Intrada purchases when looking on my shelf, and remembered being annoyed that Horner had evidently nixed some cues and generally wanted his usual 'listening experience' when making the first one - the entire album feels far more curated than it probably is in the film. First rate Horner score and a great movie too. A bit like Ghostbusters 2, the initial album largedly satisfied my needs but I'm sure I'll end up getting this one too. The labels are collectively going nuclear with Horner right now!

Listening again, you've actually got two distinct parts of this cue - the piano and string wanderings at the start (which just annoy me - it's not my style at all) then the strings come in for the section used in the film, then back to more piano faffling. The beginning of the strings sounds like it's composed to merge with the very ending of the piano section, hence it seems to me to be a whole composition and they just recorded the elements separately. But yes, please please please include the string section by itself

The only Indys I have in jewel cases are the LC and DoD OSTs. I quite like digipacks - they're far less fragile and still give you a nice cover to look at. I'm about to get a ton of them in the RoP box.

Is that inferring you don't have KotCS at all?

While I wouldn't expect the full film version of Viktor's exit to feature on an expansion (it's an edit, no two ways about it) I'd absolutely expect active consideration that they would include an orchestral version of that cue without all the bits they added after. I'm glad someone else finds the plucky strings as annoying as I do. It's not difficult to use A.I. remove the plucking where Victor finally reaches the outside but heck... we shouldn't have to. I suppose the only thing that might stand in Mike's way might be if the cue was put into the film at a point where the elements were available separately but only the full album mix was stored (similar to the stems not being available now for Ripples). That or Williams loves his Jazz so much that he vetoes an orchestra-only version.

Given that Mike did Hook and got it approved by KK and co., I find it hard to believe credentials are a problem. I still think there are two problems here - (1) a reluctance to release something expensive (to them) that won't have a guaranteed significant return and (2).... only nerds understand or care what's wrong with the existing OT releases. Same with the Indy box - in a relative sense absolutely no one knows what's wrong with those. There are less obvious issues with the prequels, assuming they exist as digital sessions or tapes that can be transferred like any other 00s era project. In a purely musical sense I don't see what makes them so hard to conceive and assemble as an intended score plus alternates, other than a deep-down expectation that given "it's Star Wars" no one's allowed to make any mistakes or leave anything off.

DME has a Project Manager? What's his excuse for the DoD car crash?

Oh I knew about all the inserted bits yep. I just couldn't remember whether Williams had done one of his needless track shufflings. Ahhh... order restored and Thor is a happy bunny. It's not in film order

Maybe $20-25 per film, 6 films (focus on the OT/PT for now) = ~$120-140. A massive deluxe box set with a fancy book about the score surely isn't going anywhere for less than $200-300, possibly more. The question may be whether Disney would recognise the diminished manufacturing costs and lower the price, or decide that Williams and SW fans will pay anyway. Either way, I'm only buying RotS.

I might be misremembering but isn't the original album fairly close to the entire score in film order? See above comments - it may (and does indeed) feel curated but almost nothing's missing nor subject to Williams' usual meddlings. In that sense there's very little curation at all.

I think they should go digital. A 20-disc box set will be expensive and niche and cause all sorts of complications with fitting tracks on and the inevitable scratched CD in the process.