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This movie was pitched as "the movie Andy saw in 1995 that made him a Buzz Lightyear fan". However, had this movie been made in 1995, it would've had a much better score by people like James Horner, Michael Kamen, Bruce Broughton, Alan Silvestri, etc. So, why not pretend we're back to the 1990s and hire an older composer? Sure, Horner (the ideal choice) and Kamen aren't alive anymore, but this could've been an amazing opportunity for Broughton or Silvestri. Or Joel McNeely, David Newman, Mark Mancina... Choosing Giacchino seemed like an easier, lazier choice. "Oh, this guy has made a lot of movies for Pixar, so let's bring him back". But it could've been much more special with an old-fashioned composer.

Holy shit. Not only was Episode 3 as a whole brilliant, the music for this show is so good For the love of god, please put Joel McNeeley on another Star Wars project

What do you mean? Zurg in Toy Story 2 has a distinct 16-note theme that shows up multiple times. I wouldn't call that "musical sounds." It goes by quickly, but if Giacchino wanted to elaborate on it and add a B section or something, he could have done so. Heck, doesn't Buzz already have a theme in the franchise too? He has completely deteriorated as a composer, imo. I can't remember the last time I was actually excited about a new score of his, and I say that as someone who loved Medal of Honor, Secret Weapons Over Normandy, Up, Lost, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, etc. But there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of his music over the years; the torturous 4-note Batman motif, and now we get stuff like this from him: What even is that?! It's just simple repeating figures, occasionally going up by a half-step or step. And this isn't the only track he does stuff like this in; listen to a lot of his recent work and it's the same sort of thing. Speaking of simplicity, I'm reminded of his piano piece for that Gloria Cheng album Montage; Williams, Newman, Desplat, Broughton, and Don Davis' pieces all sounded like legit works by good composers, but Giacchino's sounded overly simplistic and amateurish. I really can't figure out what happened to him. I can't believe that there was once a time when I actually bought into the "He's the next John Williams" hype mindset about him. Maybe he's become spread too thin with so much work, maybe he's out of ideas, bored, or just grown lazy. Or maybe he was always like this and I just didn't realize, but I swear there was a period when he was MUCH better than this.

Hello, forgot to come here to advertise i posted an another remastered John Williams Video. As some maybe noticed on @Marc recent post about his cover of Theme from Sabrina, I did the remastering of the video he used. (I think it's miguel who gave me the original material 15 years ago, so thanks to him !). so Where is "Theme from Sabrina" Remastered. During the remasterisation process, a technical issue surfaced that I only noticed recently. Unfortunatly the "solution" slowed a LOT the process to do all these remasterisations because my computer is not powerful enough. The "issue" is very present on "Theme from Sabrina" or any old analog material. It's everywhere on the picture. Getting ride of it take times (money too.., it needs some specific software). Meanwhile, you can enjoy the amazing version of Marc, the original one still available or Call of Champions below where the issue is hardly noticeable. I changed a bit the overall colors because the one from the original recording were awful. Here it is :

I quickly checked a couple of websites and found out that Disney already wend ahead adding lots of films and shows (they actually separated the FYC in "Theatrical" and "Streaming" sections) such as Doctor Strange 2 and Lightyear for this year's FYCs. No music added yet. https://disneystudiosawards.com/ Curiously I noticed that for Star Wars Visions, Disney isn't endoring any score for the awards, but only one of the songs from the "Tatooine Rhapsody" episode. Quite a shame considering that some of the episodes had pretty solid orchestral scores.

The music was not substantially better in the latest episode. Still just kind of there. I feel like this whole series is one big missed opportunity. I don't get it as I quite liked the music in Loki. It was fun and had enough of an identity to stand out a bit. This score is just bland. The JW theme is nice but not enough to carry the whole series.

Yeah, this score does keep rewarding with repeat listens, I've noticed. I really want JNH to move away from franchise stuff however if they make another Jungle Cruise, I'd love to hear a development of his work on the original. Completely hooked on this lately, you may have noticed. I've been having a really stressful few weeks at work and this score soothes me to no end when I get home. Newman... please make more stuff like this!

Paul Duncan (author of The Star Wars Archives: 1977-1983) said on Twitter that the spotting session was on January 10th, 1977 Also, I'm guessing this is pretty common knowledge already but your list doesn't say it, recording started on March 5th, 1977 according to the 1997 SE liner notes

To be completely, 100% bluntly honest, I wouldn't care either way if John approves of it or not. Mike Matessino is the only person whose involvement matters to me in this case, at least when it would come to future Star Wars and Indiana Jones expansions. It would be nice to have John's stamp of approval, but not at the cost of missing material or potentially janky edits.

Thomas Newman - The Player Joel McNeely - Shadow of the Empire Jerry Goldsmith - Air Force One Expanded Michael Kamen - The Iron Giant Expanded

Sounds like the name for a planet in the Star Wars galaxy.

He said bumpuda. Pay attention! Karol

I wonder… after seeing Ross work on Obiwan as the official adapter of Williams' theme….and his involvement in Rogue One as orchestrator when he is not in Giacchino's team, could that mean that the infamous treatments of Williams' themes could be Ross' work? 🙃

Not bad news. It will take time for people to accept a middle eastern heroine. Also, the show was a smash hit among Gen Z, which was their target audience.

Good thought, and actually almost perfect timing! Yavar

The entire approach to this show is totally fucked. But I am looking forward to hearing the music by itself. I've been too distracted by how bad the show is.

Zimmer's DC music may be more recognizable, but that doesn't make them good scores. I think I prefer listening to almost every MCU score, memorable or not, than to the drum inferno that is Man of Steel.

It’s definitely fun but nowhere near his best stuff, his recent string of scores (except for his themes from The Batman) have been rather disappointing

Would anybody happen to know when La-La Land will be getting Wrath of Khan back in stock? Just saw that Intrada re-released Search for Spock, and I thought it might be good to grab both James Horner Trek scores and explore his earlier sci-fi work.

Well if that's your point then you're just flat out wrong that Star Wars has always had haphazard continuity. From the release of Heir to the Empire to The Clone Wars movie the continuity within the expanded universe was a huge consideration and meticulously handled. Any contradictions that arose would actually be addressed and 90% of the time resolved in future media or from members of the Lucasfilm Story Group themselves who took great time and care to respond to fan concerns. The amount of interconnectivity was also insane, you'd be reading a comic set in the Clone Wars and it would be simultaneously referencing events from the Knights of the Old Republic comics, as well as setting up elements for the Thrawn Trilogy which doesn't occur until post-ROTJ Now, when I say 'to The Clone Wars movie' I don't mean that they just stopped giving a shit about continuity after it came out, but rather the Lucasfilm Story Group faced some extreme continuity challenges. Your favorite person Chen, George Lucas, had allowed people to flesh out the area between the Prequel movies quite significantly on the stipulation that he wasn't going to touch it. However, in the mid 2000s he changed his mind and put together The Clone Wars which completely bull-dozed through the existing expanded universe to the point the story group had to come up with a band-aid fix known as 'T canon' which elevated TCW above all the rest of the expanded universe. Unfortunately, while this means that TCW could continue unfettered by any restraints to what was previously established in the era, other EU stories had to bend over backwards to blend the old stories with Lucas' and it became pretty messy. The interconnectivity remained however, and some of the best expanded universe works came out post-2007 so it wasn't a complete write-off Come post the 2013 Disney buy-out and everything is erased except TCW. Theoretically, with this clean slate, continuity should be easier than ever to maintain but the values of the Lucasfilm Story Group shifted significantly and no longer was there the same attention to detail in the pre-Disney expanded universe. However, a bizarre paradox arose where they had the ambition to have everything that was created, be it video game or novel, from now on to be on the same level of canon as the movies. This ultimately proved to be an utter disaster and fell into the MCU trap of alienating the general audience by having events in movies heavily rely on expanded material to understand So, from my point of view when I look at the absolute disastrous state of Star Wars these days I can't help but partly attribute it to de-prioritization of continuity. I also can't help but notice how unbelievably solid it was pre-Disney when that was a greater concern, and how it lead to richer stories and a far more cohesive-feeling universe that also managed to not feel homogenous That is why I do not tolerate the idea that Star Wars should just continue on the death-march it's currently on because 'that's what it did in the past', because not only is that not entirely correct but it's the kind of attitude that breeds stagnation

I agree that while Kraemer's mockups are well done, it's super frustrating it was not recorded at the original orchestral sessions. I honestly like this better than the version of The Meld which was used in the film! It actually allows Ilia's theme to reach a destination and have a true journey over the course of the score...which befits such a great theme and makes up for the generally disappointing treatment of the character herself in the film. It works PERFECTLY in context; I get that they changed it because they wanted to focus to be more on V'Ger, but I still would have preferred this personally. Yavar

I don't follow what you're saying 3M2 New is part of the film score, it's simply that the scan of it included in the common sheet leak is a version John Neufield wrote at some later point in time, the actual handwritten version from 1977 hasn't leaked, just like a bunch of other cues haven't had their originally 1977 handwritten versions leak either

IMO the first 3 episodes of the first season are the weakest of the whole show. It's around after then that they kind of shed all the Family Guy style humor and just try to be Star Trek TNG with occasional jokes instead of an outright comedy

I think even Giacchino himself knows how tired he is of making these high-concept blockbusters and their convoluted plots. Look at how he named one of the cues: It's a clear ask for help from someone who is tired of the messy plots of movies like this one.

I thought I read a long time ago the series was planned to be 5 seasons total. Depending on how this season goes I could see one more wrapping things up nicely. It definitely does not have legs for more than 5, for sure

The thing is that people - the industry and I would say increasingly moviegoers - really do see Michael Giacchino in this light. He's done a good job promoting himself in this way if nothing else. It's not just "Let's get the Pixar guy", it's "Let's get the old-fashioned orchestral guy". Like a lot of us I would say that he's leaned on that reputation in lazier and lazier ways in the last ten years, but he is basically viewed as the only guy under 60 who's made it his whole business to try and do what those guys were doing in the 80s-90s. So the fact that anybody would want him for this - and that he would want it for himself - makes more sense than just him being a stock Pixar/Disney hand. But I know what you mean about having a score by somebody who literally would have been doing a space adventure movie for kids in 1995, regardless of anybody's takes on Giacchino.

Good choices. And, I gotta say, nice legs!

Lightyear, which premiered with $51m, came in second place on the American box office this weekend, behind Jurassic World Dominion's $58m second weekend. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2022W24/?ref_=bo_hm_rw Fun fact: this is almost an exact replica of what happened back in June 2015, when the opening weekend of a new Pixar movie (Inside Out) came in behind the second weekend of a Colin Trevorrow-directed Jurassic World movie (the first one). However, back then the conditions were much more favorable for both: Inside Out's opening weekend was $90m (the biggest for an original movie back then) while JW's second weekend was $106m (breaking the Avengers' record for biggest second weekend ever). https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2015W25/?ref_=bo_rl_table_2

"Bump bida, bumpida, bumpidua"?! What the hell have you been smoking?!

The film, performances, and recording are all fantastic. And the updates to the book help a lot too. I love it.

Many Thanks ! Good Work!!

I really do like "As the Jurassic World Turns" and the theme in "The Park is Closed" as well as the main theme in Fallen Kingdom. But yeah, The Lost World is next level compared to the Giacchino scores.

Yeah, I am just speculating. Maybe by that point, Williams didn't care all that much and liked how Yoda's theme sounded.

Yep. In fact, we had a whole thread here on JWFan about the pitch problems on the Concorde Raiders and Temple of Doom albums and how to fix them, as you can see below.

Yes, but not for free. You have to be a member of ASMAC to get access to the archive of all their recorded zoom presentations. Since it's a professional industry organization, they charge dues. The events themselves aren't free unless you are a member or member of partner organization. ASMAC - Join ASMAC

Why does Zurg's theme sound like Slavonic March by Tchaikovsky, and not like the great pre-existing theme for the character by Randy Newman? I honestly don't understand why Zurg needed a new theme. In Toy Story 2, Zurg's theme is present both in the actual score for the film, as well as in the in-universe video game they play at the beginning. If Lightyear is supposed to also basically be an in-universe movie, then why wouldn't it also use the Randy Newman theme for the character?

The Fox Fanfare is good🤌

I don’t like Holt‘s stormtrooper theme. It’s a weak theme. Low brass in octaves with nothing else going on isn’t epic. It’s lazy. It’s what a first year composition student would write for an assignment.

I did, it was pretty terrible overall. Completely missed everything that made Halo special, and I say that as someone who was open to very different events playing out. It just felt like any other sci-fi show, dangerously bereft of camp or a tone of heroism. Instead it was cynical and shallow The score was also a huge let-down, low brraaaaams when we see the Covenant Holy City instead of the religious exultation of choir that's used in the games also contributed to the tone feeling very flat

I've seen the first two episodes now (sadly all that's out), and I LOVE this show, and its music. Just wonderful. Sad that a bunch of review-bombing trolls have made it the lowest rated MCU show on IMDb, because it is honestly one of the best. Love the cast (especially the whole Khan family), the creative direction, the eclectic score... love EVERYTHING about this show. My one little niggle about the score is that the main theme/motif reminds me of the beginning of a long-lined theme from Nami Melumad's Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. But I'm sure that's just one of those musical coincidences that happens sometimes (like Broughton's Shadow Conspiracy/Young's Hard Rain/Callery's 24). Yavar

Christopher Larkin - Hollow Knight I love this score so much, and got the jones to hear it again after the new trailer for the sequel. The thing is, the OST album is a perfectly fine, a very well crafted and arranged highlights collection, as is the later Gods and Nightmares sequel album. But between the two there's still so much music in the game that isn't on either album, not to mention the music is so good, I'd love to hear most of it loop twice instead of just the one time in most album tracks. So I've wanted to make my own expanded album forever but never found the time, and I recently came across one someone posted online. So I eagerly tried it out, but was pretty disappointed. It was poorly edited (like on a technical level), poorly arranged (the evolved boss fight music was appended to the original boss fight music throughout), still missing stuff, and just not satisfying ultimate overall. Luckily it motivated me somewhat to finally get off my butt and make my own, so maybe that will happen soon. Lena Raine - Moonglow Bay I love the main theme, and the quiet / calm/ relaxing tracks here. The more up-beat tracks are fun to, but overall lets to a listening experience of constantly shifting moods. I think I'd like to make a playlist of just the chill tracks and I'll probably listen to that a ton. Raine is back! Various - Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade OST I've listened to this a ton since it came out; Not the whole album as-is, because it's one of the most disappointingly constructed OST albums I own, with tons of off-putting tracks I don't need to hear for sidequests and random stuff mixed in with the great narrative underscore. By cut-down hourlong playlist is great! James Newton Howard - Jungle Cruise I listened to someone else's shorter album cut-down from the long OST album. Hey, this is a good score that really faded out of the conversation pretty steeply after a few weeks. It's worth revisiting, there's some good stuff here! If they make a sequel movie, I could see him delivering a pretty cool sequel score.

This movie was stupid. It's perfectly acceptable summer popcorn fun, and is well paced and never boring, for sure. But if you think about the plot for too long it's all just rather silly and inconsequential, which I guess can be said about all the movies after the first one... Some thoughts I had as the movie went on: Cool prologue! Nicely explained the world the movie is set in, helpful for someone like me who saw JW and JWFK once but didn't remember specific plot details or character names. There was a cloned human in the last movie? OK yea, I remember now that I think about it Wait, why does Dodgson look completely different than he did in the first movie? Wait, why is this character even named Dodgson? This guy is so completely different in every possible way from the first film's character, they should have just invented a brand new character for this role instead of attaching the Dodgson name to him. Lame! The special effects in this movie are basically perfect, the CGI dinosaurs are integrated into the live action plates perfectly Locusts? Giant locusts? About to destroy the entire earth's food supply? This plot is both simultaneously ridiculously over the top and kicked up to epic proprotions, and also inconsequential as its resolved so swiftly, and you never care about it as much as the fate of the main characters, who are barely involved with it Dodgson is actually a good bad guy in this, along with Biosyn being a good choice for the final evil corporation. They just shouldn't have called him Dodgson! Going back to corporations heavily involved in genetics being the biggest corporations on the planet goes back to Crichton's original novel, which is pretty cool. But everything else about this movie is so 2020s and not 1990s in the slightest Laura Dern doesn't remind me of Sattler at all, just... modern day Laura Dern. Sam Neill doesn't sound like Grant AT ALL! He sounds like a New Zealander! What happened? Oh man, their reunion scene has the most awkward exposition dump I've ever witnessed in my life The Malta sequence was fun and probably the best part of the movie Dichen Lachman! Where have you been since Dollhouse!? Her character is so riduculously over the top, standing there in her white outfit striking all these poses, laughable, but so far into over the topness, it circles back to just being goofy fun. The whole thing with laser beams being used to tell dinosaurs who to chase is silly. I also liked the underground gambling world scene with dinosaur fights, guys spit-roasting dinosaur meat, etc. Felt Star Warsy kinda, and these films need more goofiness like this at this point! The Biosyn valley in the Dolemites is freaking ENORMOUS, it looks bigger than the islands! Dodgos is like Tim Cook eh? Kinda funny. I like this Ramsay guy, I hope he's not setting Grant and Sattler up to get captured. Malcolm seems basically the same as in the original movies, but Goldblum is always that quirky in most things I've seen him in so that helps There's a ton, just a TON of action/chase scenes in this movie, and I don't mind it! Conversely, there's WAY too many scenes where dinosaurs have our main characters surrounded, and just open their mouths and roar at them instead of instantly killing them, and our heroes manage to escape. Overall, come to think of it, there isn't enough deaths in this movie! I like that we're not in another amusement park; The Biosyn valley makes it feel more like the second movie which is nice I like the variety of new dinosaurs; I always like that the first 2 films stuck to all the big classic ones, but by now on movie 6 it's nice to get random stuff like the one with the long claws and different kind of flying ones and stuff. What the hell was up with the burning locusts setting the whole valley on fire? That's not how fire suppression works.... Dodgson being killed by the same species that his lacky Nedry was killed by in the first movie is kinda fun Blue and Beta are cute and I am glad they survived the movie This doesn't really wrap everything up, they could make more of these things...

Listened to it for the first time (Amazon Music). Theme From The Long Goodbye is a nice (Barber-esque?) arrangement and kinda stood out for me. Was it the same for you? Of course, it's hard to evaluate the violin concerto on only just the first listen but somehow it felt reminiscent of the first violin concerto.

As one of those guys, I usually find good music in anime and video games but I still wish those standards applied to modern Hollywood and what used to be a consistently good franchise for music.

The "that's how planes get to the ground" joke and Tim Cook references made me lol:

I only listened to the single that was released. What happened to Giacchino??? This isn't very good.

Giacchino’s action music still, in terms of writing, is usually about on par with a cat on a piano. And cats are cuter.

NEW SCORES/SONG AVAILABLE: Amazon Prime Video Night Sky (Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans) [19 cues, 39:23] Outlaws, The (Dan Jones & Stew Jackson) [34 cues, 1:39:54] [see the NOTE in the spoiler section] With Love [Song - "Nochebuena" (Lin-Manuel Miranda), 02:33]

Do they have a vinyl player though?

Are you my girlfriend or what? Do you think I really care about how are you going to take me? It's through my crotch actually.