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Filmtracks Recommends: Buy it... if you enjoy any ambitious, large-scale variation on Holst's "The Planets" and John Williams' similar adaptations. Avoid it... if you hold the music from the original television show true to your heart, for Bill Conti ignores its established themes. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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 over-clothed in the film. Among the few highlights of the film for movie-going masses was the fact that the project was 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. Conti himself was coming off of his remarkable success for The Right Stuff and the Rocky scores. To his credit, he pulls out all the stops in his effort to plagiarize Holst's "The Planets" and John Williams' own adaptations of said 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 dialogue. The 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 knock-off? 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 Star Trek IV theme that seems just a tad out place. Never does the music indicate the 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 are almost too patriotic for the subject matter. This score contains parts that sound as though they're composed by John Williams (without the intricacies of his writing) for the Olympics, or a typical IMAX score for a subject of grand vistas. As bold and ambitious as Conti's music is in all of its thunderous cymbal crashes and timpani rolls, the themes and underlying constructs 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 of the theme from the television show; even the equally-flawed Transformers film used the television show theme. 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 has been released twice. The original 42-minute 1987 album released by Varèse Sarabande concurrently to the film was a very early CD and fell out of print within a few years. A 1992 re-release by Silva would add 27 minutes in five major cues, and was temporary available to collectors before itself falling out of print. Overall, fans of the original shows will be disappointed in Conti's lack of loyalty to the established franchise, and other score collectors could find its hopelessly optimistic and stale fanfares to be tedious after half an hour. **
The 1992 Edel album's insert includes a note about the score from Conti. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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