222max

When you talk about how influential a piece of cinema is I think you have go go way beyond the obvious things like visual effects and other production values. Clearly, Star Wars and its sequels were revolutionary in many film making techniques but in terms of substance you will find that Lucas grabbed from all manner of myth, legend and sci-fi convention (including Star Trek, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers etc.), the works of Akira Kurasawa and many, many others. Not that I'm accusing him of ripping these sources off, but that he hardly dreamed all this stuff up himself. Interestingly, while both franchises are culturally relevant Star Trek seems to have fit more into our world than Star Wars and even much of our current technology seems inspired by it. They even named a space shuttle after the starship Enterprise. Modern cell phones bear an uncanny resemblance to the flip-lid communicators the original Star Trek crew used. Warp drive has been legitimately explored by physicists and talking computers are now old-hat. Visual effects are a fluid art form whose state is always advancing and changing. But great story-telling and imagination never goes out of style. Here's a good dispassionate view of the Star Wars mythology. Lengthy but worth the read. http://www.decentfilms.com/sections/articles/starwars.html

Actually the thread is about which franchise is your favorite which makes it completely subjective and personal. As I said above, my personal favorite franchise is Star Trek. But I like/love Star Wars too. I could just prefer to spend more time in the Star Trek universe than the Wars universe.

Roddenberry's pitch to NBC was that it was Wagon Train in space. And, for the record, I don't see the real significance in the whole Special Effects angle since effects are only a means to telling the story. That's actually one of the things about Star Wars which got out of hand in the prequels. Lucas became so enamoured with his toys that the he seemed to forget that he was directing flesh and blood actors and not CGI creations. Take away much of the eye candy and what are you left with?

I think Star Wars has been more successfully realized on screen but I think that I find the Star Trek universe more interesting. Just more potential for really interesting, scary, alien things. Star Wars is a sort of legendary fable like King Arthur or Lord of the Rings. Places inhabited by humans in some distant time or place far removed from us while Star Trek is an optimistic view of our human future. Not that it would be anything like Start Trek but that it could be. I'm also a bit burnt out on Star Wars at the moment. I could go a long time before the series is revisited on screen because I feel I've seen enough of it. But even after the Rick Berman led rape of the Star Trek concept I feel much more excited to go back into the Star Trek universe at the moment. Speaking of Star Trek on TV I feel they really wasted material after DS9 by making Voyager, a show contemporaneous with DS9 and TNG, and then Enterprise, a show which attempted to go back to the origins of the Federation. In my opinion they should have gone further into the future, like 2-300 years after the Next Generation era, and shown us what was happening with the Federation. Would it still be in existence? Would it be larger? Would mankind have evolved idealistically or would something have caused the Utopia to collapse? So much potential yet they wasted it giving us more of the same.

I don't want to be a sour puss here but these kinds of petitions always strike me as a bit silly. You have to realize that the producers and director will always chose the composer they want and think is best. Public opinion, no matter how passionate, will not have much influence on this.

Give the man a break. I saw him two years ago in Chicago (at the time he was 73) and that concert visibly took a lot out of him for he was clearly fatigued at the end of it. You have no idea what he had gone through to get to the Detroit concert nor how tired he must have been afterward. In the final analysis, Mr. Williams gave you what you paid for... a concert of his music and no doubt he gave it everything he could in that regard. To expect anything more is asking too much.

Was Goldsmith that great? Well, WHAT great? His value to this art form is far greater than any amount of awards or public accolades could possibly measure. His contribution goes far beyond how popular he was or wasn't... or how many CD's he sold or how they rate on internet fan sites. Goldsmith understood music and he understood drama. Two fundamentals of the art which almost no one these days has in equal measure (except John Williams and a quickly dwindling group of others). There are so many of his influences still being felt throughout film music that he has gone uncredited for. He practically invented the modern action score by stressing hard physical action and modern rthyms and tonalities. Zimmer and others of his ilk should be thanking Goldsmith in every liner note of every CD they release. Goldsmith would never have been as warmly embraced or as popular as John Williams, not because he wasn't as musically capable, for most certainly he was, regardless what some here have been saying. Goldsmith's approach and style was just tougher and less sympathetic. He could be as lyrical as anyone when required to do so but what made Goldsmith great was his ability to always work for the best interest of the film he was scoring. To subjugate his personal sound and style for the good of the narrative. He was a fearless and inventive innovator who was always looking for application of new ways of expressing his craft. Where Williams seems always controlled and conscious of pleasing the audio sensibilities of his audience Goldsmith would have no reservations about letting his music get dirty and ugly if this best suited the moment in film. That's why a Planet of the Apes can both inspire as well as irritate. His music fits the world of that film so closely that it seems naked and shocking apart from it. That doesn't make it "noise". That makes it a vision which is so dependent on the context of the subject that one needs to try harder to understand where Goldsmith was coming from to really appreciate it. That's what great art does in most cases. It requires the viewer or listener go outside of their own aesthetic and comfort zone and explore a different, new one. No, he would never have achieved Williams profile or status. But that means little in any real sense. Goldsmith was simply not as accessible. But that very same objective and unsentimental quality is also one of the things that made him great as well. A Goldsmith score reaches you sometimes on a visceral, gut level, other times on a primal and emotionally level. But either way, it's always filtered through the intellect for Goldsmith was always thinking, always reasoning. For some this may make his music seems cold or even uninteresting. But it's this intelligence mixed with his supreme mastery over music, combined with a rich imagination which makes Jerry Goldsmith one of, and in many ways, THE greatest film composer of all time.

I absolutely love that cue. It's the best development of that "Bum-bum. bum-bum-bum. bum. bum-bum-bum-bum" ostinato in the whole score. But as good as all the other Star Trek scores are they still function strictly as movie scores. Star Trek:TMP, on the other hand, transcends even that purpose and attains work-of art status. I happen to believe that if it weren't for the fact that it originated as a film score it would stand as a legitimate symphonic tone poem.

I think it's perfectly fine to go by the complete score since that what you probably heard in the movie. It's not just about how it measures up on CD.

It's almost impossible to find now but Night Crossing has a fantastic flight theme. More majestic than free-flying as in Soarin but it's fabulous nonetheless.

This one.

That's great and all but the question was only between the two in the poll.

Of course you know the Universal logo sequence hasn't been composed originally by Goldsmith and therefore cannot be polled in a fair Goldsmith vs. Williams poll. I even believe John Williams has reworked the sequence into the current and the generally known version, although I am not sure about that. McHugh composed the original motiv, which has been arranged by James Horner, extended by Goldsmith (and, arguably, re-orchestrated by Williams). If you just ask which logo sequence is the best regardless to who composed or arranged it, I have to admit I prefer Universal slightly over Dreamworks. What?!! Can you provide sources for any of this because I'm sure that both of these are completely original compositions. Goldsmith wrote the Universal fanfare as it is now. Williams has never, to my knowledge had anything to do with it. On ET's 20th Anniversary it was rearranged to include the ET theme on the back end but that was used that year only. As it sounds today it is 100% Jerry Goldsmith. The Jimmy Mchugh fanfare sounds more like Superman than anything either Horner or Goldsmith wrote. You can hear it at the end of this reel. The history of the Universal logo fanfare according to Sountrack.net http://www.soundtrack.net/logomusic/ Jimmy McHugh - (1936) Jimmy McHugh - (1936) : (w/ extension) James Horner - (1990) Jerry Goldsmith - (1997) John Williams - (2002) : Adaptation of Goldsmith version with theme from E.T. This is how the current fanfare is listed with BMI. Title: UNIVERSAL LOGO Writer(s): GOLDSMITH, JERRALD ("JERRY") (BMI) Publisher(s): SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC. (BMI) c/o UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, of LOS ANGELES, CA [since the 1997 Universal Studios film "The Lost World: Jurassic Park"(??)]

We shouldn't forget that scoring a logo is in principle the same as scoring a film. The studio directs the composer to reflect the attribute that they want the music to convey. With that in mind the logos are what each respective studio directed as a musical representation of themselves. As a piece of music the Universal one is clearly my favorite as it has a very heraldic quality befitting a studio who's logo is a globe of the earth and which goes by the name Universal. The Dreamworks logo has a more reflective, child-like wonder to it which fits the visual very well. It is, after all, about dreaming the possibilities. But on a Dreamworks DVD I find myself scanning past the logo whereas on Universal DVDs one I turn up the volume and let it rip. In fact, I feel cheated when they substitute the Goldsmith music for other music or sound effects as they often do.