/ Soundtracks

Intrada's latest soundtrack releases may be from television projects, but these small screen adventures are sure to be big hits for fans. The latest entry in the Special Collection series is a two-disc presentation of the score to the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's It. The best-selling book of 1986, It was the story of a group of young friends in 1950s Maine who thwart an interdimensional child-killing monster, only to have it return when the group settles into adulthood. The two-part

La-La Land Records inched closer to the end of their 2011 reissue slate yesterday with a pair of sci-fi-oriented releases - one a reissue, and one appearing for the first time anywhere. Television fans are going to enjoy the label's newly-released three-disc set of music from the cult classic series Space: Above and Beyond. Though it only ran for one season, the scope of the show - a planned, five-year saga about a war between Earth and an alien race in the mid-21st century - anticipated the

La-La Land Records yesterday took a break from contemporary film score reissues and presented an expanded version of a classic score by Dimitri Tiomkin from 1963: 55 Days at Peking. A dramatization of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 China, 55 Days at Peking depicts the Battle of Peking from the perspective of a group of foreign diplomats protected by the Chinese government in Peking's legations district. Charlton Heston stars as an American major defending the ambassadors, and David Niven and Ava

It's always a cause for celebration when a label gets some long-lost piece of music out to the public for consumption. And Intrada's special mid-week batch of archival film scores is no different, offering two premiere horror scores, one of which was presumed lost for years. First up is the score to Fright Night, the 1985 horror classic (recently remade this past summer) about a teen who has to stop his next-door neighbor, a bloodthirsty vampire, from feeding on the innocent. The score is the

As previously reported, La-La Land Records' newest release is the premiere of Elmer Bernstein's score to the classic comedy Trading Places, available as of yesterday. One of the most fondly remembered films of the 1980s, Trading Places is the story of a rich banker (Dan Aykroyd) conned by his bosses to lose everything as part of a "social experiment" to switch a rich man with a poor man and observe the results. The poor man who assumes Aykroyd's life is a street hustler played by Eddie Murphy -

The sleeping giant that is Varese Sarabande's CD Club awoke for the second time yesterday, announcing four killer soundtracks from the film score vaults for your perusal. Chief among the surprises in this week's batch was the announcement of a John Williams score from the Universal Pictures film Midway (1976) - a major coup for fans of the Maestro. A gripping World War II drama starring Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune and a host of A-list actors, Midway sees

If Elmer Bernstein had only composed the indelible theme to The Magnificent Seven, the composer would have been considered a legend.  How lucky for us, then, that Bernstein (1922-2004) wrote the scores for more than 200 films and television shows including Sweet Smell of Success, The Ten Commandments, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Airplane! and Ghostbusters, contributing memorable themes to each.  The music of Bernstein has been incredibly well-represented on compact disc this year.  Kritzerland has

Few disputed the title of 1976’s The First Nudie Musical.  And if there’s been a second nudie musical, nobody’s told me about it.  But even if a second one does exist, chances are it doesn’t have a fraction of the satirical charm of the film described by the New York Post’s Judith Crist as “the Star Wars of nudie musicals!”  In fact, the Paramount Picture sat just beneath the science-fiction behemoth and the James Bond thriller The Spy Who Loved Me during its first week of wide release in 1977. 

The War for Soundtracks rages on, and La-La Land Records' latest volley is the long-awaited expanded edition of the score to 1941, the 1979 World War II comedy scored by legendary composer John Williams for longtime collaborator, director Steven Spielberg. Take some of the most talented young comedians of the '70s, put them in a picture written by two of the brightest upstarts in Hollywood and put the world's hottest young director in charge. Sounds like a formula for success, right? Maybe most

Last weekend, The Lion King sat atop the box office once more, a potent reminder not only of the 1994 film’s enduring power but of its music.  Though Elton John and Tim Rice famously composed its songs, it was Hans Zimmer who picked up an Academy Award for the orchestral score.  Zimmer made his first major splash in Hollywood with the score to Barry Levinson’s 1988 film Rain Man, following it up with high profile assignments such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Days of Thunder (1990) and Thelma

Even in the wake of some heartbreaking news in the soundtrack catalogue business, there's a lot of excellent goings on with some of your favorite soundtrack labels: First up, Intrada announced yesterday just one new CD release, but it's a big one: the world premiere of Alan Silvestri's score to 1990's Young Guns II. The Generation X-friendly Western series, which starred Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips and Emilio Estevez as notorious outlaw Billy the Kid, had a strong pedigree for the

Here’s looking at you, kid. Film Score Monthly founder Lukas Kendall sent shockwaves through the film score collectors’ community with a blog post yesterday morning announcing the end of the Film Score Monthly reissue label. Having recently released the label’s 240th and 241st titles (the second volume of music from “Johnny” Williams’ score to 1966’s Not with My Wife, You Don’t! and a Nathan Van Cleave "double feature" of The Space Children and The Colossus of New York), Kendall confirmed