...did you skip his score for TMNT2: Out of the Shadows, or did I miss an entry? 'Cause I just gave it a fresh spin recently while going through the TMNT scores, and I was looking forward to your thoughts on it! Personally, I love the brassy fanfares for the cues around the Turtles and the action music, and I like the Shredder theme, but there are also some rather dull ambient sound-design queues that surround the other villains (Baxter Stockman and Krang). On the whole, it feels in the same vein as his Transformers 1 score: a guilty pleasure with some good thematic tracks, even if it isn't super original.

And man, I just love this series. Whenever you post a new entry, it's like a mini-Christmas. I can't wait to read it!

> I've come around to the idea that if I'm not liking what I'm hearing I
> can't always throw all the blame at the composer. The people who are
> hiring them want to hear that kind of sound reproduced in their movies,
> and there have been loads of comments made by composers in this musical
> lineage about how they don't appreciate being told to just copy their last
> successful score - not only Tom in the quote I referenced today, but even
> Hans who hates few things more than having a test screening go well when
> it has an earlier piece of his in the temp track and being told by a
> studio that was why it worked and he should do that again. But turning
> down gigs relatively early in your film composing career (or being seen as
> difficult) is usually a bad career move.

Agreed. I came around to that realization regarding scores and composers a few years ago. Composers really don't get as much freedom in what they write as score fans often think they do.