Jump to content

Obvious Uses Of John Williams Music Used As Temp Tracks


scallenger

Recommended Posts

If there has ever been a thread for this before, forgive me. I wasn't able to find one myself. But I thought it would be fun to have a thread that points out any film, TV show, or advertisement/trailer that was clearly made to mimic John Williams music from perhaps a "temp track" to the point of extreme familiarity for fans like us.

Let me start with one.

For anyone who ever watched the BBC TV show "Merlin", there was a track of music that first appeared in Season 3 that sounded VERY familiar after hearing it, to the point where after a few moments I knew right away exactly what it sounded like. Can you guess?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SocpHvw278c

Answer:

Hatching Baby Raptor -

Jurassic Park

BrachioIngen also showed me one worth mentioning as well. This one is trailer music for the film "Castle In The Sky". Can you guess this one? The "inspiration" is mostly just in the first part of it.

Answer:

Journey To The Island -

Jurassic Park

I'm sure there are MANY more cases like these out there. Post them! :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good idea for a thread! This one is pretty clearly influenced by JW, but to be fair JW was channeling Aaron Copland big time when he wrote it.

War motif from SPR, War Horse and Lincoln

No temp track for this one, as it is a concert piece, but there may be an influence here (although it's defintely more tentative than the other examples). Start at 1:12.

Love theme from Far and Away

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know if it it's that obvious, but starting at 1:07...

Answer:

It sounds a lot like Superman

The whole was heavily tracked with lots of Williams goodness, particularly Far and Away.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This one isn't from the world of film, but the Williams influence is clear. Steve Bramson's score for Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune is like E.T. with a little Horner thrown in.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This one isn't from the world of film, but the Williams influence is clear. Steve Bramson's score for Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune is like E.T. with a little Horner thrown in.=

WOW! I really like this one, despite the influence! Great use of it. But where on Earth is this version of Space Mountain? I had never heard this music of it before.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just because Zimmer used a solo violin in that scene means it was inspired by Williams?

There's more connections than just the solo violin. The empahsis of a downward whole step glissando at the end of the phrase, the shapelessness of the phrases, the backing of a low string sustain... Zimmer does new things with it, but I'd say SL almost definitely served as a jumping off point for him. There's also some non-JW stuff that sounds somewhat Yiddish to me (although I don't know enough about Yiddish music to be sure), which again suggets that Zimmer's mind was on SL when he wrote this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Joel McNeely, look in the dictionary under 'blatant' (though thew suite omits the 1:1 copies of DESERT CHASE and the stormtrooper music in DEVIL'S SLIDE)

IRON WILL

And indeed much of McNeely's Young Indiana Jones, which was very inspired by many Williams scores, including of course the Indys but also stuff like Hook.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Indeed! Especially the music he did for "The Phantom Train of Doom", as highlighted in both the YouTube video and the DailyMotion one. He does it in a pretty fun way, though. Honestly, it is actually really excusable that Joel made his music sound like a copy of that from Williams Indiana Jones music in a Young Indiana Jones series. In a way, it almost adds continuity. But it's when he makes it sound like other unrelated Williams work on top of that, like he does here as well, that makes it a bit more "okay, we get ALL the temp music you had to work with clearly" territory.

and

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xabv7s_joel-mcneely-indiana-jones-and-the_music

(various)

Hook and Belly of the Steel Beast - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ooh, you're right!

And I don't think this thread would be complete without this little stint Trevor Jones did for the film Around The World In 80 Days. The only video I can find of the music actually already compares the track it blatantly copies, which is from Hook. You can either watch the whole video to hear the Williams track and the Jones track back to back, or start it at 6:28 for the Jones track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BSl0oS0En4

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This one isn't from the world of film, but the Williams influence is clear. Steve Bramson's score for Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune is like E.T. with a little Horner thrown in.=

WOW! I really like this one, despite the influence! Great use of it. But where on Earth is this version of Space Mountain? I had never heard this music of it before.

Yeah, it's actually a very fun piece of music, as long as you can get past how blatantly derivative it is. I really enjoy it. This was the music for the original version of Disneyland Paris's Space Mountain. Sadly, it's no longer in use - they revised the attraction with a new "Mission 2" story, and they brought Giacchino in to score the new version. This was at the same time he was writing the awesome score for the refurbished Space Mountain in California, too, and he used a somewhat similar approach for Paris. But for my money, he wasn't nearly as successful as with the California version. Anyway, bottom line, the Bramson track is no longer in use. (Although you CAN still hear it on occasion in California, of all places - the Observatron kinetic sculpture in Tomorrowland occasionally starts rotating and swinging its arms with music, and one of the pieces they use is Bramson's Space Mountain track.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How funny that it ended up in California! I'll have to try and look out for it where you said it could play next time I go back (hopefully next year).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Joel McNeely, look in the dictionary under 'blatant' (though thew suite omits the 1:1 copies of DESERT CHASE and the stormtrooper music in DEVIL'S SLIDE)

IRON WILL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=code6X_Ta5Q

FYI, McNeely was asked by the filmmakers to copycat the temp track as close as possible. He's a damn fine musician, don't bang on his head unfairly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, but it's something that should be always taken into account when evaluating these kind of things. Film composers sometimes can do very little other than satisfying their employers, so they have to comply diligently even to absurd requests.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure. I think there are composers who probably accept the idea of deliberately copying the temp track out of mere survival through the process, especially if it's a first-time collaboration with a director and/or producer. It also depends on the overall atmosphere during post-production, knowingly a moment where confidence about the film's results can be lost and where the filmmakers' nerves are starting to collapse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why anyone would think that it would help a movie to feature 1:1 copies of several well-known scores from the last 10 years is beyond me. The bouncy LAST CRUSADE-style IRON WILL mimics was going out of fashion anyway and it didn't even suit the movie very well (the same could be said for the SILVERADO theft).

McNeely got much more convincing results in SQUANTO - inspired by his colleagues without ever resorting to this kind of pedantic borrowing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny enough, Joel's "Shadows of the Empire" Star Wars score sounds a lot more like his own original work than an actual Star Wars score like it was meant to be, despite the few obvious quoted themes. I find that a bit ironic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why anyone would think that it would help a movie to feature 1:1 copies of several well-known scores from the last 10 years is beyond me. The bouncy LAST CRUSADE-style IRON WILL mimics was going out of fashion anyway and it didn't even suit the movie very well (the same could be said for the SILVERADO theft).

Well, unless one was involved directly within the production, it's almost impossible to know the how's and why's of some decisions that were made, especially when it comes to the so-called "temp track love" and so forth. From what I gathered talking with several film composers, it seems that directors and producers feel uncomfortable and insecure more often than not when it comes to making decisions about the music score. They are scared to let the composer do his thing and try all the ways they could to "force" the stylistic choices, as if to take a sort of authorship themselves onto the music score. Some composers refuse to stand behind these practices, while others try to make their own way among the madness.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Apparently. Of course it still begs the question what kind of idiot stands behind a composer and says 'steal the bouncy LAST CRUSADE-music or i will fire you' (paraphrased). As if the success of the scene hinges on the re-use of music written for an altogether different movie.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting thread. Is there one for Danny Elfman? Man, I swear (especially around Christmas time) there are a few commercials with "What's This" and Edward Scissorhands scores, almost verbatim, just one note switched.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ooh, you're right!

And I don't think this thread would be complete without this little stint Trevor Jones did for the film Around The World In 80 Days. The only video I can find of the music actually already compares the track it blatantly copies, which is from Hook. You can either watch the whole video to hear the Williams track and the Jones track back to back, or start it at 6:28 for the Jones track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BSl0oS0En4

I don't think there is any doubt here, it can't even be argued. Clearly the filmmaker cut the scene directly to Williams' track and then Jones came in and replicated it beat for beat. A slight enough change to avoid copyright infringement.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Credit for finding this one goes to scissorhands:

Olympic Spirit

wow...

where is the music from?

About mcneely and Young indiana Jones.

When he came to Ubeda and did an inverview, i think i recall him saying that Young indy was a great opportinuty for him (isnt it one of his earlier works?) and that doing it he could practice his orchestrating, composing, arranging skills.

So since Phantom train of doom is so blatant, i think he was testing his orchestration on that episode. You cant hear something like that in the other episodes he scored, i think.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ooh, you're right!

And I don't think this thread would be complete without this little stint Trevor Jones did for the film Around The World In 80 Days. The only video I can find of the music actually already compares the track it blatantly copies, which is from Hook. You can either watch the whole video to hear the Williams track and the Jones track back to back, or start it at 6:28 for the Jones track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BSl0oS0En4

This is just plain stupidity. As a fan I sure love Williams' music there but it definitely is not great film making... What happened to the originality and pride of these guys...?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well I think it may be telling that Trevor Jones hasn't really scored anything in a LONG time, right? But it still may not have been his fault but the filmmakers request. But who are we to really know?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Credit for finding this one goes to scissorhands:

Olympic Spirit

wow...

where is the music from?

It was written 5 years ago by bassist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Maurice Wininsky for the celebration of the orchestra's 50th anniversay. It's called "Festival Fifty", and it was a coincidence that I found the piece, because I was recording another work from that concert. I had to double check to make sure it was not a rearrangement of Olympic Spirit done by Williams himself. The video is indeed from my own Youtube channel, and the comments seem more interested in the Olympic mascot than the music itself :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.