In addition to the other things mentioned already, there are also many people out there in the world of music - typically musical academics - who have an underlying lack of respect for Williams and his colleagues, simply because they are considered film composers. That's not a finger point at musical academics in general (I am one myself), but at a small "faction" who seem to do nothing but criticize anything that is enjoyed by mass audiences. I've had several run-ins with these people throughout my career (especially during degree work), and their argument always seems to stop at just saying "John Williams is such a plagiarist." It doesn't go much further. They may be able to spot a few places where things DO sound similar, or even places where it's obvious that the temp-track was a huge influence on the director's wishes ("Star Wars" bits, "Face of Pan," etc), but it's obvious they are totally ignorant of the enormous amount of music written by the guy over the last 60 years. Play them an excerpt from the Flute Concerto, and they'll have no idea it's Williams. Why? Because they are making a blanket statement without having all the facts necessary for the statement. Also, these people are often just repeating something they've heard someone else say, because they feel it makes them sound educated. They haven't spent time and effort examining Williams' entire oeuvre, they just know a few isolated spots, and in order to make themselves feel important, they criticize someone else's work. It's a lazy way to build your own ego, but musicians are often the worst when it comes to petty trash-talking. The other aspect (mentioned already) is that sometimes these critics are educated enough (whether formally or just because they love music), but they aren't educated enough to know that what they are hearing isn't actual plagiarism, it's musical style. When Bernstein's Mass premiered, it was highly criticized for (among other things) sounding too much like everything else he'd written - especially West Side Story. Now, it's considered a masterpiece, although it still generates controversy for completely different reasons. On the same note, nobody ever criticized Beethoven for sounding like Beethoven, or Mahler for sounding like Mahler. I'm not comparing Williams to any other composer, but the fact is that every composer in history had his/her own bag of compositional "tricks," which they would dip into frequently. This board is FULL of examples of Williams' tricks. Want to see the ones J.S. Bach used? Open any music theory textbook written since 1750. And yeah, Bach sounds like Bach too...the lousy plagiarist!