Smeltington

Many of these releases, while flawed, still gave us some missing music that we could at least cobble together into a better presentation. I picked Return of the Jedi because the sound is bad enough, even I can tell it's bad. It's like paying for a bootleg... not to mention paying actual money to own Jedi Rocks (and not getting Yub Nub in the bargain).

Wow, these are really excellent resources! I'm glad Mike was able to share these with us.

That's a nice touch. I do appreciate all the various styles and instruments Desplat incorporated. And I was surprised how much buzz the film seemed to get... there was a long line at the local art cinema opening night, which I don't see often.

Alas poor Rifkin!

Thanks for the info, guys. I was wondering the difference between MV and Remote Control as well, but that explains it. Is MV still around?

I've been enjoying the album too. It feels more like background music/wallpaper than some of Desplat's other recent work, but it's a lot of fun. Canto at Gabelmeister's Peak is my favorite track.

I haven't followed the story of Mr. Rifkin. What makes him so infamous?

And that is an encouraging thought.

I wasn't a fan of all the songs added to Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, Lion King, etc. in the special editions. Regardless of the quality or origin of the songs, I'd rather have the option of watching the film in its original form. Plus the animation in the new scenes didn't match the original animation at all. I'm glad they included Morning Report on this set for the sake of completeness, though, and they did the right thing saving it for disc 2 as a bonus track.

No - there is a two-page write-up from a producer giving a little history of the songs and score, generally. Then there are the lyrics and credits. Then there is a half page of track notes (from Hansy Boy himself, apparently), and it's ONLY for the demo tracks on disc 2. Not a lot of information either - basically just Hans saying "This track was the score for the scene where x happened" for each track. It closes out with a handful of pages of artwork, from early sketches to finished designs. So the liner notes are not exactly a score fan's biggest dream. They're more catered towards the Disney collector, as opposed to the score collector. Definitely nothing as detailed as you'd see from LLL, Intrada, etc. The booklet serves its purpose for me, and I found the producer's write-up to be sufficient information about the score. To me, what really matters is the music, and I'm very excited. I avoid sessions and boots, so this is my first taste of the music outside of the OST and the few times I've seen the movie. In that regard, I'd say Disney did a really great job! Well, I got my copy yesterday too and although the liners didn't go in depth about the scoring process, the booklet was still really wonderful. I love all the little illustrations, and the design of the whole set is really well done. The producer's note was pretty revealing, too. I never knew quite how involved Zimmer was with the songs. Disc 1 was really a joy to listen to. I'm amazed to have a presentation of the score from Disney that I won't need to edit or augment in any way. The new Stampede and the ending sound great... I think there might be more music in Hakuna Matata? And we even got Hawaiian War Chant... amazing! And regardless of the new/alternate material, it's just cool to have an official release of such great material that gets it right. I may not even rip Disc 2 to my computer, though. I listened to Morning Report and Warthog Rhapsody, and it's interesting to hear these other ideas once, but they don't compare to the songs that made it into the film. The demos were also very cool to hear, but they sounded pretty bad, as if a good source for the recordings couldn't be found. And I skipped the Elton John songs completely - thank you, Disney, for relegating these to the end of Disc 2! But I'm not going to complain about the extra material, since they totally nailed Disc 1 as well as the packaging.

William Ross, I'm the boss of the Chamber Orchestrations got your whole crew in danger Johnny Williams called, I said fuck it I got your music adapted and conducted You think you oughtta write another Harry Potter? I said, fuck it man, don't bother You already wrote one, don't waste it I got my Xerox, I'll copy and paste it Till the writing police confiscate our pens It's William and Williams, the reunion of friends

Ditto. Likewise!

Do the liner notes mention or explain any of these differences?

This should arrive today for me as well, although Amazon's release day delivery is sometimes a day late for me. This happened e.g. with Lincoln. But I'm very excited for this, and the rest of the series. Between this and EotS, today's a big day!

I'm looking forward to reading Mike Matessino's article. I'm always wishing we knew more details about how these releases come about, and how their final form gets decided. I'm interested to hear what kind of involvement Williams/Spielberg may have had, too.

I have a turntable that I use all the time, and I didn't forget about the release date for this, but ultimately decided not to buy it. I couldn't justify it because I know I'd never feel like listening to the OST arrangement of the JP score. But I do appreciate that there was an opportunity for such a lovingly packaged release of the score.

My name's Smeltington and this is my story... I flew out of Atlanta Thursday morning with my friend and fellow JWFan, known as jwalk713 on the forum. We had two days to enjoy Boston, a lot of which we spent outdoors biking through various parks and greenways, renting a boat, going to the beach (Castle Island), etc. We also took some time to visit a couple of comic and record stores. We found an old Starlog magazine from 1979 with fascinating articles about David Prowse, an upcoming movie called Alien, etc. The weather was good, our spirits were high, and the good people of Boston were treated to more than a few of our impromptu renditions of JW themes. We were staying in the same hostel as Thor, but from the sound of it I think we enjoyed the experience a bit more than he did. On Saturday we joined everyone for dinner at Uno, and for the rest of the evening we enjoyed the company of Jason, Marcy, Thor, Nightscape, and quite a few others. We got to meet fellow Atlantan and Superman enthusiast Croweyes1121. I also had the privilege of speaking to JWFan member ins and his friend, who were visiting from Germany on a John Williams pilgrimage ten years in the making. I learned I need to give Tintin another listen, and ins reached a greater understanding of Lapti Nek, a track he had overlooked, much to his own peril. Jwalk and I had a fantastic time meeting everyone. It was a great group of people, and I don't think we've gotten over the shock of being in a roomful of people capable of discussing the music of The Terminal, the Winter Games Fanfare, and Short Round's Theme. We waited around outside Symphony Hall with everyone else to try for autographs, I with my HPSS CD and jwalk with his Superman CD - his first Williams purchase ever. It was crowded, though, and when Williams arrived there were unfortunately a lot of rude and shameless people being very pushy and not very respectful to Williams. He was gracious enough to sign a few things anyway. The interior of Symphony Hall was gorgeous. We were up on the balcony, third level, on the right side. I always like to avoid looking at the program, so each piece performed was a surprise to me, but I did catch strains of Jurassic Park and Hook as the orchestra members warmed up. The chorus was a very pleasant surprise. I was extra excited for Flight to Neverland, Adventures of Mutt, Sound the Bells, and Call of the Champions. And I never get tired of hearing Harry's Wondrous World or anything from Star Wars. I think Jason covered everything after the concert in his post. All in all it was a wonderful evening, and I'd like to thank Jason for organizing the meetup, and all the JWFans in attendance just for being so awesome Let's all do this again!

Hi Daniel, I thought I was the only member of the JWFan Atlanta chapter. Hope you can make it to dinner!

Me and a friend will be joining you guys for dinner Saturday.

Seconded. If you're replacing an album in your library with a new rip, you can copy/paste the tags from the old tracks to the new, all at once. Unless you simply don't bother editing tags at all, this will make your life a lot easier.

Sucker Punch... also aptly named

Like the TPM UE, I can only ever rejoice that this was released, regardless of the issues with it. It added immensely to the raw materials that we true believers have at our disposal to make our own preferred score edits. True, I'll never listen to the actual Lalaland discs again, but worse things have happened. Assembling and enjoying my edit was the first time I really got into this score, and I ended up including it in my Williams top 10 in Joey's poll. So in the end I'm very glad for this release.

AMAZEMENT!!! This is really great news, on all the releases I'm glad they left the bonus song for the bonus disc, and didn't slot it into the main track list.

I'd instabuy this if it didn't mean reverting to the OST arrangement, instead of my near-C&C edit. As it is, I'll have to think about it. It'd be a lot of fun to have this on vinyl, and I like the first sleeve. It's good to see some different takes on the artwork after 20 years of the standard JP logo.