With the first two film scores in the trilogy already getting expanded album releases, it was only a matter of time before How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World received the same courtesy. Some of the changes are minor. With Love Comes Loss (the first half of the original album track With Love Comes a Great Waterfall) is moved into chronological order, and Toothless: Smitten is broken into separate tracks. The Hiccup I Know / Armada Battle adds back in 45 seconds to the final battle, much of it rearrangements of familiar viking action passages. New Berk Feast adds perhaps the franchise’s first instance of source music. The expanded album also seems to have removed some microedits from a few tracks on the original CD (seemingly designed to get the runtime for the major score tracks absent the credits suite plus the Jonsi song to be around 75 minutes), though this could just be my brain - clouded with the fog of new parenthood - playing tricks on me.

Thankfully, the other incremental material is quite welcome. Rescue Mission / Busy Busy Berk adds two minutes to the end of the original album’s Raiders Return to Busy, Busy Berk - a prancing and occasionally comic exploration of several legacy themes. Another brief low-intensity multimelody romp can be found in Setting Up Camp, with the subsequent Valka’s Warning articulating the fate theme via some rather lovely woodwind writing. The fate ostinato and fate theme dance around each other in Stronger Together before the original film’s Berk theme plays concurrently with Powell’s new exodus hymn. Intriguingly, there’s at least one track that seems to accompany a scene that was never fully animated with Near Miss Valka (largely a Grimmel theme reprise). The short New Island is probably the only additional track that ends up feeling nondescript.

As others on the board have already noted, if there’s one missing track I wish could’ve been in the original album, it’s Grimmel’s Surprise. You get new takes on the hidden world theme, what Powell called the sex riff (previewing its heroic “I’m coming, babe!” outburst in the armada battle), and the fate ostinato. Best of all, that track contains a uniquely sinister take on the second film’s Alpha theme (shades of Christopher Young), a theme that otherwise went unused in the third film. Perhaps that last point was one of several ways the score appeased studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg around his desire to minimize slavish continuity in the wake of the commercial underperformance of Kung Fu Panda 3.

As with the prior two expansions in the franchise, even with all the highlights ending up on the original album, and with some of the additional material already covered on online FYC presentations of the score, the Deluxe Edition still makes listening to the music a more rewarding experience.

*****

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