Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you enjoy the bravado of any ambitious, large-scale variation on Gustav Holst's "The Planets" and John Williams' similar adaptations of the era. Avoid it... if you hold the music from the original television show true to your heart, for Bill Conti ignores its established themes and offers a hopelessly optimistic score that fails to adequately address the emotional range of the concept. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. ** Track Listings (1987 Varèse Sarabande Album):
Total Time: 42:58
Track Listings (1992 Edel Album):
Total Time: 68:53
Track Listings (2008 La-La Land Album):
Total Time: 119:25
* not used in film All artwork and sound clips from Masters of the Universe are Copyright © 1987, 1992, 2008, Varèse Sarabande, Edel Company (England), La-La Land Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/15/97, updated 7/12/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 1997-2005, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
1987 Varèse
