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Released some years before Airplane! – hell, even before That’s Armageddon! – the world had The Big Bus, a 1976 comedy lampooning the then-fashionable swath of disaster films. Though The Big Bus received nowhere near the accolades that Airplane! got, it was a pretty silly romp with stars like Stockard Channing, Ned Beatty, and John Beck (best known as Mark Graison, one of Pamela’s beaus on Dallas). It also boasted a score by David Shire, who composed the scores to ’70s classics All the President’s Men and The Conversation (and would have the semi-thankless task of doing the orchestral score to the Bee Gees-dominated Saturday Night Fever in 1977 – “Manhattan Skyline” and “Night on Disco Mountain” were his works).

Shire’s score to The Big Bus is getting a premiere release from Film Score Monthly. The set features the complete score – mixed from the original 16-track masters under the supervision of Shire – along with several alternate and source cues. Chief among them is a vocal performance by Tommy Joyce, a lounge singer on the wayward bus played by Murphy Dunne, perhaps best known as the second keyboardist for The Blues Brothers after Paul Shaffer. (It’s Murph, not Shaffer, who appears in the film.)

The set is limited to 2,000 copies and can be ordered here. The track list is after the jump.

David Shire, The Big Bus: Music from the Motion Picture (Film Score Monthly Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011 – original film released 1976)

1. Main Title
2. The Radiation Room/The Explosion/No Pops, Not Him
3. The Big Fight
4. Cemetery Scene
5. Eye of the Cyclops/Alex Plants the Bomb
6. Also Sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss)
7. Breaking Wind Montage
8. Dusk Drive By/Camille and Gun
9. Dan Finds the Bomb/Disarming the Bomb
10. Bush & Camille & Kurtz & Claude
11. Springfield Sequence
12. Claude & Sybil
13. Harbinger Curve
14. Kitty in Jeopardy/Kitty, I’m Coming/Dan Rescues Kitty
15. Faith/You’re Just in Love (Irving Berlin)
16. The Rescue
17. End Title
18. Welcome to the Oriental Lounge/Six Months to Live/Doggie Doctor/Wedding March (Mendelssohn)/Tangerine (Johnny Mercer & Victor Schertzinger) (Tommy Joyce Medley) – Special Material Composed by Murphy Dunne
19. Faith/Everything’s Coming Up Roses (Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim)
20. Air on a G String (J.S. Bach)
21. L’Inverno—Winter, Op. 8, #4 (Antonio Vivaldi)