 |
|
| Conti |
|
|
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 to 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.
From its massive scale, 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 had to be recorded with several orchestras in Europe, yielding
less than stellar results. The players in Munich responsible for the
mass of the recording were simply incapable of performing any of the
complex cues for any lengthy period of time, requiring that shorter
takes be awkwardly spliced together to form a score that matched to any
degree what Conti had written. 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 all of our attention off of 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. Only occasionally does Conti
utilize varied percussion to represent the world of Eternia and its
eclectic characters, and thus, the traditional orchestral sounds almost
too streamlined in its perpetually patriotic tone for the subject
matter. An excess of high percussive elements and major key fanfares are
the major reason for this overly-optimistic tone.
Aside from the ridiculously upbeat nature of cues like
"Skeletor Arrives," 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 score 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.
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.
**
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 album contains extensive
notation about both the film and score.
