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Review of Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (Joel McNeely)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you have already been impressed by Joel McNeely's
solid orchestral output for children's adventure films during this era
and desire a smoother, more character-centric variation of the same
sound.
Avoid it... if one of the main attractions of these early McNeely scores is their loving emulation of John Williams and Bruce Broughton's styles, an element far less prominent in this entry.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain: (Joel
McNeely) Before the straight-to-video market for children's movies
really began to take off, a project like Gold Diggers: The Secret of
Bear Mountain would be dumped into theatres with typically poor
results. This 1995 Universal failure was one of the studio's several
attempts to wrestle the "friends and adversity" portion of the
live-action children's genre away from Disney, but it was met with only
$6 million in domestic returns and has struggled to find a wide avenue
of release on DVD in the decades since. The plot of Gold Diggers
is frightfully generic, showing the friendship between two young,
teenage girls (Christina Ricci and Anna Chlumsky) and how their
adventures together in the mountains of Washington help heal their
familial situations and own self-doubts. When Ricci's character moves to
the small Washington town from Los Angeles, she is immediately an
outcast, and she befriends Chlumsky's tomboy, who also suffers from a
broken home life and doesn't fit in at school. During their summer
vacation, they decide to trek to nearby Bear Mountain in search of
mythical treasure left by a tragic female figure of the past, and they
eventually find themselves in competition for their loot. The film would
have little impactful meaning if not for its supposed lesbian
undertones, an implicit part of the production that has apparently made
Gold Diggers a champion of "coming of age" gay interests.
Addressing none of this topic is the streamlined music for the film, led
by the generic light rock song, "The Flying Song," written and performed
by Colin Hay for the opening titles. Accompanying the girls on their
adventure is Joel McNeely, who was quickly becoming a reliable source of
solid orchestral music for this genre in Hollywood. His first widespread
recognition came with his Emmy award for "The Young Indiana Jones
Chronicles" in 1993, and his knack for adeptly emulating the style of
John Williams earned him several assignments writing music for
children's productions of the mid-1990's that would have loved to have
Williams music but couldn't afford it. Thus, McNeely became the master
of navigating Williams' style through temp track territory for Disney
and others, picking up a fair amount of Bruce Broughton along the way.
Largely a continuation of this type of work is Gold Diggers,
which also throws some James Horner mannerisms for the genre into the
mix as well.
If there was one thing you could count on from McNeely for scores like Squanto: A Warrior's Tale and Iron Will in 1994 and then Gold Diggers, it's a robust and accessible series of orchestral themes. These three sibling scores are all entertaining, but whereas the two from the previous year maintain an emphasis on large-scale melodic grandeur, Gold Diggers concerns itself with sensitive character identities for softer symphonic renderings. It does feature a handful of significant action passages, each really indistinguishable from something you would have encountered in Iron Will. The "wholesome" factor has been cranked up to a greater level here, though, begging the comparisons to Horner's lighter touch for solo woodwinds and strings in a slightly whimsical environment. Extended sequences in Gold Diggers explore affable but mostly inconsequential variations on the score's main themes. Redemptive spirit overflows from these extremely palatable performances, "Bear Mountain" and "Molly Morgan's Gold" both building up to muscular renditions of that motif. The secondary character themes are not as memorable despite filling up space with pretty, piano-led versions of ideas heard in Williams' Hook. There is the quirky Irish material to contend with, too; the historical Molly Morgan character is treated to spirited fiddle and whistle music that is an early precursor for McNeely's consistently lovely Tinker Bell scores from many years later. Fortunately, these interludes and the action music in "The Great Rescue" finally begin to shed the Williams reliance that had defined McNeely's career thus far. The latter cue, in fact, contains music in its mid-section that clearly foreshadows The Avengers. Likewise, the acoustic guitar in "Into the Lake" offers a more uniquely parochial spirit. One constant that is so saturating in Gold Diggers that it becomes irritating is McNeely's perpetual tingling of light percussion. There is so much triangle contribution to this score that you might think you've got pixie dust stuck in your ears. One of the reasons why this element is so evident is because of an unusually strong recording and mix of the score for McNeely; his outdoors music from the 1990's doesn't always translate well to album for a variety of mix-related reasons, but Gold Diggers at least sounds very good. If you're looking for a place to start with this specific genre of music from McNeely, Squanto and Iron Will are still better places to start, because Gold Diggers does tend to drag in several cues. Regardless, its sound is more original and will reliably lift your spirits. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 41:51
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
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