You are quite correct. Elfman has certainly not been using the same score for over a decade. Nightmare Before Christmas and Men in Black are good examples. Though I hold Nightmare Before Christman to be Elfman's best work.

Truth be told, if ANYONE is starting to repeat themselves these days its Horner. I wish he would do something besides sappy drama, but oh well, I'm a Horner fan and turn a blind eye for the most part

> I think soundtrack music is one of the few genres that actually requires
> musical background/knowledge for full enjoyment. Elfman has matured as a
> composer as stated before. Like the person in this thread earlier stated,
> he requires the listener of the task of listening. Simply put, he's going
> to make you ask questions and answer them in music. By doing this, he's
> moved away from doing simple themes or the usual thematic score approach
> (although this score does have a few themes, they're not that prominent)
> and thus it loses appeal, especially to somebody like you who lacks
> musical knowledge. Soundtracks are about emotions, not themes. What's
> great about the Spider-man soundtrack is that it's almost cheesily
> orchestrated (for that comic book effect) but it's a top notch job in
> conveying emotional messages.

> And that rolling thing your talking about, I'm guessing with the strings
> where he does some fast arpeggios and stuff and it sounds like
> "rolling". I personally love that. I don't really see how it
> could get that repetitive since really he never makes it a focus in his
> songs that much. It's a style preference, just like the way Williams
> handles his brass a certain way...it's style. It's what makes Elfman music
> Elfman...ish.

> To say Elfman has been churning out the same stuff since Batman is a load
> of crap, I'm sorry. Compare Batman to Nightmare Before Christmas to Black
> Beauty to Sleepy Hollow to Family Man to Spider-man. There's really no
> repeated score theme throughout these, except Spider-man and Batman which
> sound like comic book scores but are scored completely differently.