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Masters of the Universe: (Bill Conti) When you
think of people who might have had the Power of Greyskull in the
mid-1980's, composer Bill Conti just isn't one of them. Then again, the
same could be said of Menahem Golan and Yorum Globus of B-rated Cannon
Films or first time director Gary Goddard, whose credits included the
creation of Universal Studios' mythical kingdoms "Kong on the Loose" and
"Conan." The fatal flaw of their 1987 flop
Masters of the
Universe was that lead actor Dolph Lungdren didn't seem to have that
power either, forever sealing the fate of the franchise on the big
screen. After four years on the small screen, "He-Man and the Masters of
the Universe" proved to be a formidable competitor to "Thundercats,"
"G.I. Joe," and "The Transformers," opening the doors through its toy
line for those other concepts to flourish in similar fashion. Mattel's
action figures were everywhere, and their legacy remained on the small
screen through 2000, with various spin-off ideas maintaining the legend
of Eternia well past a run of the original show that expanded to a
hundred and thirty animated episodes. Warner Brothers decided three
years after the cartoon's debut that the time was right to make a
live-action film, but with only a budget of $17 million, some of the
more exotic characters had to be jettisoned, and with money running out
at the end of production, a final battle scene between He-Man and
villain Skeletor was axed (the story's ending therefore failed to make
sense). The film grossed well initially, but only barely covered its
production costs in the end, so a promised, already written sequel never
materialized. The budget restrictions forced the filmmakers to
necessitate that much of the story be shot on Earth rather than Eternia,
and with Lungdren bumbling through his lines without any respect for the
character of the original television series, more than a few people
complained. Interestingly, the perverts of the world were disgruntled
because many of the muscle-bound characters who were always showing
thunder thighs or washboard abs in the cartoons were sadly over-clothed
in the film. Among the few highlights of
Masters of the Universe
for movie-going masses was the fact that the project represented the
second appearance of actress Courney Cox on screen, but true Eternia
fans were only impressed with Meg Foster (and her striking pale eyes) in
the underutilized role of Evil-Lyn and, of course, Bill Conti's original
score. Given the massive scale of that music, it's safe to say that
sufficient money was stashed away at the start of production to pay for
Conti and such a large ensemble. Well, enough for Conti, at least.
Due to a plethora of reasons not entirely immune from
financial difficulties, the score for
Masters of the Universe had
to be recorded with several orchestras in Europe, yielding less than
stellar results pieced together cue by cue depending upon which
musicians could handle the composition at that moment. The players in
Munich responsible for the mass of the recording were simply incapable
of performing the most complex cues for any lengthy period of time,
requiring that shorter takes be awkwardly spliced together to form a
score that valiantly attempted to match what Conti had written on paper.
The composer himself was coming off of his remarkable success for
The
Right Stuff and the
Rocky scores. He never tried to hide his
inspiration when conjuring his Wagnerian structures and explosively
broad tone for
Masters of the Universe, readily admitting where
he looked for guidance in such a relatively straight forward assignment.
To his credit, he pulls out all the stops in his effort to plagiarize
Gustav Holst's "The Planets" and John Williams' own adaptations of that
piece in already famous fantasy fanfares. The brassy, snare-driven score
rarely stops to breathe in between extended performances of the title
theme and Skeletor's "Mars"-like subtheme, and for the lumbering
Lungdren, the music really has to be so propelling to keep our attention
away from his painfully delivered dialogue. A problem arises in the fact
that nearly every aspect of these themes seems contrite to a certain
degree, almost stumbling into parody territory. Is this a score in which
Conti is just trying to adapt himself to the exact sound the producers
wanted, or did he intentionally attempt a
Star Wars and
Superman knock-off with levity? Or both? The music is
consistently upbeat, even in statements of the villain's theme, leaving
you with an all-too-fresh feeling of the awkwardly rendered tone of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that seems just a tad out place.
Never does the music indicate that true peril is ensuing, nor do the
character-building subthemes for woodwinds stand out as anything
special. The "Cosmic Key" theme, conjured originally by the director and
adapted well by Conti into some of the earthlings' sentimental passages,
is a highlight in several softer cues, even though it's suffocated by
surrounding pomp. Only occasionally does Conti utilize varied percussion
to represent the world of Eternia and its eclectic characters, and thus,
the traditional orchestral force sounds almost too streamlined in its
perpetually patriotic tone for the subject matter. The excess of
high-range percussive elements and major key fanfares are the major
reasons for this overly-optimistic tone.
Aside from the ridiculously upbeat nature of cues like
"Skeletor Arrives" in
Masters of the Universe, the underlying
constructs created by Conti are simply too flagrantly informed by John
Williams' classic Bronze Age scores to ignore. Damn near the entirety of
Masters of the Universe sounds as though it was composed by
Williams (without the intricacies of his writing) for an event like the
Olympics. As bold and ambitious as Conti's music is in all of its
thunderous cymbal crashes and timpani rolls, the themes and related
fragments are stale renditions of Williams'
Superman music, and
despite the harmonic pleasures that the music delivers, significant
deficiencies in inspiration drag the score down. The fatal blow to
Conti's score is the total disregard for the theme from the television
show; even the equally-flawed, animated
Transformers film of the
era used the television show theme. This was reportedly a flippant but
conscious choice by Conti, but ultimately the absence of the original
"He-Man" theme here is simply inexcusable. On album, the music is still
considered by many to be a triumph for Conti, and it has been released
several times through the years. The original, 42-minute 1987 album
released by Varèse Sarabande concurrently to the film's debut was
a very early CD and fell out of print within a few years. A 1992
expanded issue by Silva Screen would add 27 minutes in five major cues
and was temporary available to collectors in the soundtrack specialty
market before itself falling out of print. In 2008, La-La Land Records
finally resurrected the score in its complete form, even throwing the
redundant, original 1987 album performance onto the end of a second CD
for good measure. The performance quality doesn't differ much, nor does
the quality of the mix. The first version of "End Credits" has some
distinct distortion in the bass region upon some timpani hits in the
villain's theme performance, however. The five to ten minutes of fresh
material heard on this 2-CD set for the first time on album is quickly
swallowed up by surrounding music. Given the problematic lack of
variation and nuance in this score's performances, this revelation
shouldn't come as a surprise. Still, the 3,000 copies of the 2008
product were expended rather quickly and Intrada Records decided to
re-issue the base, complete score presentation from the La-La Land
offering (combining that material onto one CD) for an unlimited 2012
pressing. Overall, fans of the original shows will be disappointed by
Conti's lack of loyalty to the established franchise sound, and other
score collectors could find its hopelessly optimistic and stale fanfares
to be tedious after half an hour. No amount of superior album treatment
can hide the fundamental flaws of a score that impresses casual fans
with its bravado but fails to creatively capture the spirit of the
concept.
** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
The 1987 album's packaging is sparse. The 1992 Edel album's insert includes
a note about the score from Conti. The 2008 La-La Land and 2012 Intrada albums contain
extensive notation about both the film and score, the former in greater depth.
