Courtney Sees Ghosts

'Incredibles 3’ Announced At D23, With Brad Bird Returning To Direct

A lot of great action cues are around 3:30 to 4:30 mins, which disqualifies a great deal of cues but thought of "some" over 5 mins:
 
I Don't Think Now is the Best Time - Hans Zimmer
Hard to Starboard - James Horner
The Sinking - James Horner
A Building Panic - James Horner
The Destruction of Hometree - James Horner
The Last War - Ramin Djawadi
Open Road - Hans Zimmer
The Train - James Horner
The Thestral Chase - James Newton Howard
Like a Dog Chasing Cars - Hans Zimmer
The Hand of Fate - Part I - James Newton Howard
The Turn - Saving the Coast Guards - James Horner
The Plaza Of Execution - James Horner
Saving New York - James Horner
The Death of Quaritch - James Horner
The Battle (Narnia) - Harry Gregson Williams
The Battle (Gladiator) (Hans Zimmer)
Sewer Attack - James Newton Howard
Canto at Gabelmeister's Peak - Alexandre Desplat
Tick Tock (Shadows - Part 2) - Hans Zimmer
160BPM - Hans Zimmer
Running of the Bulls - John Powell
Bastard - Ramin Djawadi
The Hunt - Simon Franglen
Underworld - Alexandre Desplat
Invasion - Alan Silvestri
Battle of the Bewilderbeast - John Powell
Tangiers - John Powell
War - James Horner
Golden Egg - Patrick Doyle
Battle at Agnicourt - Patrick Doyle
World's Worst Water Feature - Michael Giacchino
Grand Bazaar, Istanbul - Thomas Newman
Snow Plane - Thomas Newman
Against All Odds - Ramin Djawadi
Stampede - Hans Zimmer
The White House - Hans Zimmer
Theoden Rides Forth - Howard Shore
Shelob the Great - Howard Shore
Osgiliath Invaded - Howard Shore
The Bridge of Kazad Dum - Howard Shore
The Forest River - Howard Shore
My Armour is Iron - Howard Shore
Fire and Water - Howard Shore
To the Death - Howard Shore
Brass Buttons - Howard Shore
Wheel of Fortune - Hans Zimmer
Coward - Hans Zimmer
The Citrine Cross - Hans Zimmer
War - Hans Zimmer
Barbarian Horde - Hans Zimmer
Hijack - Hans Zimmer
Maleficent Is Captured - James Newton Howard
Rooftop Run - James Newton Howard
The Machine Room Fight - James Newton Howard
 
Zimmer, Shore and Horner did a lot of long action cues it turns out

What are your favourite action cues that last more than five minutes?
 
Grand Central - Patrick Doyle
World’s Worst Water Feature - Michael Giacchino
Reminiscence Therapy - John Powell
Tangiers - John Powell
I Don’t Think Now Is The Best Time - Hans Zimmer
War - James Horner
Open Road - Hans Zimmer
Carriage Chase - John Debney
The Train - James Horner
Battle in the Mutara Nebula - James Horner
The Hijacking - Jerry Goldsmith
 

Michael Abels' score is pure perfection. I need more of it!

Michael Abels' score is pure perfection. I need more of it!

Michael Abels' score is pure perfection. I need more of it!

Michael Abels' score is pure perfection. I need more of it!

Michael Abels' score is pure perfection. I need more of it!

Disney is really determined to stamp out any ounce of mystique left in Star Wars, aren't they?

Went to a screening of the first two episodes last night. It’s REALLY good. Very Star Wars in feel, atmosphere, and even music (though I heard no Williams themes, he definitely felt emulated). Already memorable characters I felt connected to.
 
Only nitpick so far is that the show has a few too many of the classic Star Wars “Power Point” transitions between scenes. One happens literally in the middle of a big fight scene to cut to what a nearby character is doing, which killed any urgency in the editing for a sec.
 
We also have our titular Acolyte mind probed for a moment, which you’d think they would’ve done to our main character who’s accused of a big crime, but maybe that’s too invasive?
 
Anyway, really, really good Star Wars. Very excited to see where it goes, especially if it does start leading into the bigger picture of the Sith’s return that gets us to where we are at the start of TPM with Sidious really starting to pave the way to the fall of the Jedi (whose arrogance already has great touches in these two Acolyte episodes).
 
P.S. They made the Neimoidian’s voices a bit less racist. 😅

A completely different, earlier version of Rey's Theme
 
 
 

The Force Awakens. This time the deleted scene.
 
Among the many deleted scenes in the film is one for which JW wrote a total of three versions.  It is the first appearance of Leia, who is informed in a scene that Jakku's village has been destroyed. The second half of the scene is a comic scene with C3PO trying to talk to a "sleeping" R2. 
The first half of the scene was officially released (for some reason as two separate scenes). And the second one we can apparently only judge from Foster's novelization. Of course, the C3PO lines can't be that extended in the real script, but the sync hint "Genius" at the end of 3M29 cue matches the last line of the droid ("R2, you're a genius!"). View Spoiler for novelization fragment:
 
1. 3M29 Leia, C3PO and R2 (written no later than March 3, 2015)
The scene was originally located right before Snoke's first appearance. The cue doesn't begin with the beginning of the scene, but with the officer's address to Leia. Cue underscores the scene in its fullest version. I also tried very conventionally to "reconstruct" the scene with C3PO .

 
2. 3M29R Leia, C3PO and R2 (no later than June 12)
The "revised" version is shorter than the original. The first half of the scene has been truncated (Leia's order to C3PO has been cut out), and the last dialogue has been shortened. But Leia's theme sounds in the fuller version. Interestingly, this part of the cue appears in the film during one of Han and Leia's dialogues. 
The second half of the cue is almost unchanged, except for the addition of a bass clarinet at 0:58-1:07, and changes to the last bars for a smoother transition to the next cue (apparently, the last "silent" shot was cut). 

 
3. 1M4A Introductions (no later than July 28)
The scene has been moved to a very different place, right after the First Order departs from the Jakku planet at the beginning of the movie. Nevertheless, this served as an excuse for JW to revisit the cue again. 
The Resistance theme (both A and B!) is now prominent in the first half of the scene, while Leia's theme gets a new "polyrhythmic" rendition. 
The second half of the cue is based on the old, but heavily "revised" material. A faster tempo prompted JW to "embellish" bassoon solo with many other instruments.  


Bonus: there is a fragment in the 1M4A cue sketch that Williams crossed out before the cue was even submitted (which is very rare). It's a fragment from the second half of the cue, but it's different in texture from the rest of the cue. I made a separate mockup of it for fun. 

 

ragoz350 · 1M4A - Old fragment

The Force Awakens.
 
Couldn't resist the temptation to make mockup of 8M74Alt The Mountain. Basically, it's an alternate version of The Jedi Steps, written at about the same time as the original one. It was also recorded, but not used.

 

Just adding up the cues we definitely know were recorded (because they appear either in the film, on the OST, or are heard in the documentaries), there's about 165 minutes of music. I've marked those cues in green below. The reported total was 174 minutes, so that leaves about 10 minutes for cues that haven't surfaced anywhere, even less if the teaser and trailer cues are included in that total.
 
Definitely recorded
May have been recorded
Probably not recorded
 
 
 

Earlier version (1M5 Alt2 R) of The Scavenger cue from The Force Awakens. Dune slide is different and it's overall slightly longer than the released version.
 
 

The Force Awakens.
Made little mockups of two old versions of the 1M6 cue. 

The first version (1M6 Seeing A Mother and Getting Rations) was written along with the original 1M5 version (The Scavenger), i.e. at a very early stage of work. 
The first part of the cue was supposed to accompany a longer version of the scene where, apparently, Rey is also looking at a certain mother with a child. The moody low harpsichord in the commissary scene is also quite unusual. The cue concludes with rendition of the *first notes* of theme from 1M5 cue, at a faster tempo. 

 
The second version (1M6Alt Seeing A Mother and Getting Rations) has already been written along with a new version of The Scavenger (1M5Alt2), in which the final Rey theme appears (remarkably, these new versions are called "alternative", JW still wasn't sure about the new theme). The musical approach here is even more minimalist (it's funny that the whole cue is built on varying one motive) and concentrates more on Rey herself (in the commissary scene in particular). At the end of the cue, a "galloping" motif from the previous cue appears, but using a harpsichord synth (which, in fact, was listed in both the cue and the old versions of End Credits).  
Also here I made as bonus old version of the 1M7 Lunchtime with Rey cue (the "Flute Version" of this cue is heard in the film), with piano "solo".

 
The third version of the cue (1M6AltR One Quarter Portion) is used in the movie, and it's shorter in length because it starts at the end of the portion scene. Interestingly, at the end of the "revised" new version of The Scavenger (1M5Alt2R) there is a sync hint "The Commissary Man", so the scene with Rey working was at one point meant to be abandoned completely, but returned in an even shorter form.
 

Restored a bit of 7M2 Rey Meets Luke, with a much more subdued rendition of the Force theme than the insert that replaced this section, 6M20 Sabre Toss. This portion is tracked into the tunnel scene with the giant snake.
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ijoITO1yTd0x3c4PhNEVsW3Bg-DBRCds/view?usp=drivesdk

Got another speculative score restore video. Surprisingly, some of the music for Kylo on Mustafar appears (based on work codes from GEMA) to be titled ‘Ready To Be A Jedi’. This is the section from about 0:51–1:42 in the ‘Journey to Exegol’ track.
 
Based on that title, and what sounds to me like an appearance of the Knights of Ren motif, I’m wondering if this could be an early version of the Kylo/Knights of Ren fight from much later in the film.
 
All the known cues to feature the redeemed Ben variant of the theme appear to be revisions, so maybe Williams was originally planning to use the Kylo theme for Ben unchanged?
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SfqdFFWkxRdQ1xCTxfRbeSMDpFgwaCGA/view?usp=drivesdk
 

I’ve got a couple brief restored score videos for fragments of The Rise of Skywalker cues that got tracked into different scenes.
 
First up is ‘Filial Fencing’ (1M2?). The Luke and Leia duel flashback was apparently the original opening of the film and lasted considerably longer; the documentary shows several shots for this sequence that didn’t make the final cut being filmed.
 
’Filial Fencing’ is tracked into the scene where dark Rey appears, but I believe it was intended for this original opening, and the more threatening tone makes sense given that we wouldn’t initially know this was Luke and Leia.
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rbkgM0IhnARLaM5WHbFFORl9u_6OBxH2/view?usp=drivesdk
 

 
A cue titled ‘The Feeling’ is tracked where Rey realizes Chewbacca is still alive. It seems most likely intended for this scene of Finn and Jannah which prominently features the phrase “a feeling” in the dialogue (ultimately tracked with music from The Force Awakens):
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lQJluM0CoKRBb_kDARrwBC1tzms6oLbz/view?usp=drivesdk
 

Someone may have done it, but I decided to look at the old versions of the cues of the two Snoke scenes from TFA. And they turned out to be quite curious...
 
Let's start with the first scene. We know at least three versions of this cue. 
The first version (4m30 Snoke) is very different from the others. Here the use of synth voices (note from the score: "space" voice - distant; very still (if it can be slightly sinister)) with the slight addition of a real chorus is noteworthy. Also interesting is pretty dramatic rendition of the Kylo Ren theme at the end of the cue. 
Btw, the timpani roll at the beginning of the cue should overlap the end of the previous cue (3m29 and 3m29R Leia, C3PO & R2), intended for the deleted scene with Leia and the droids.

 
The second version (4m30R Snoke) is closer to the final cue. A male chorus is used throughout the entire cue. However, the music here is very different - the chorus has four parts (unlike the unison in the film version) and no text. The choral performance of the Kylo Ren theme is also very unexpected.
It's perhaps a rare case of such use of the male chorus in the JW's scores. 

 
The second scene has only two known versions (there may have been an earlier version, but AFAIK, it hasn't been leaked). The cue 6m54AR Bring Her To Me (old version) begins with a small orchestral introduction (almost kept in the final version), and then the male chorus sounds, like in the 4m30R cue, and so does the Kylo theme.   

I hope Randy is up to it. Listening to the expanded Pleasantville was a reminder of what a wonderful composer he is. Of course the obvious alternative would be John Powell who would be capable of coming up with some lovely new themes and honouring Randy’s style but hopefully the man himself can still do it…

This is such a pretty cue! I need more!

Another one for the pile:
 

Woman gets job = politcal agenda. Lol grow up.

Also we haven't had a movie since 2019 so what have they lost money on? Lol