After suffering from lackluster support for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996 and producing the disastrous Hercules in 1997, Menken's reign over Disney's 2-D musicals came to an end. Other composers began rotating in the duties of this genre, with even scoring legend Jerry Goldsmith making an entry for Mulan in 1998. Menken almost fell off the face of the earth after 1997, with a career stalled in limbo despite the fact he had made enough money to support himself for a lifetime. Granted, his output declined in his later scores, but if you are of the generation of movie-goers who also believes that Menken will always have his place in the animation industry, then you were intrigued, if not simply relieved, to see his return with Home on the Range. And while the project did not resurrect the same level of acclaim for the composer, it did open the door a successful return to Disney that yielded the far more popular Enchanted and Tangled in the following years. Even if you were never a Menken fan in the first place, Home on the Range showcases several offbeat extensions of Marc Shaiman's sound for the City Slickers scores, highlighted by champion Western yodeling rendered in ways you never thought possible. Menken seems to embrace these ridiculous comedy styles with great pleasure. The Western swing that he creates for Home on the Range has all of the upbeat style of innocuous 1940's singing cowboy films starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The pace of the rhythms, the whistling in the background, and quotations taken from famous Western themes of past generations are thrown at the listener in a rapid-fire format consistent with a modern 76-minute film, though. On quick glance, the songs and score seem to be identical in underlying format to Menken's previous efforts, with six songs followed by an equal score selection and song reprises mixed throughout. Still, the difference here is that the characters themselves aren't performing the songs as they always had in the past (can none of those lead actors sing?); only Randy Quaid has the token villain performance as himself in a song, a disappointing departure for Menken's previous methodology. An interesting analysis appeared in the Boston Globe in response to this change: "...while Alan Menken's songs are as catchy as ever, it's been a long, slow descent from the grace and spirit of The Little Mermaid to this. Where a Disney movie once used songs to deepen the characters or dazzle the audience, now they're just stunt interludes for such marquee names as Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and Tim McGraw to move units of the soundtrack CD."

Indeed, where Home on the Range is most lacking is in the extension of the narrative into the songs. Menken created a hybrid in which a Phil Collins-type of collection of narrators sings about the story rather than having the characters create the magic themselves. The best aspects of Home on the Range, on the other hand, are those which actually do adhere to Menken's winning formula and add to it for comedy purposes. The opening chorus song is a throwback to the prelude of The Little Mermaid, and it is appropriately repised. The heartfelt primary character song has been replaced by "Little Patch of Heaven," the clearly film's best song, performed adorably by k.d. lang (in motherly mode) once in full and as the finale reprise. The villain's song is hysterically conceived as a mad-yodeling piece in which famous tunes with Western affiliations are performed by yodelers (Quaid doesn't actually perform the yodeling), and you can receive this with either head-shaking humor or the horror of contemplating the depths of despair for Menken's career. Tim McGraw's "Wherever the Trail May Lead" is generic and pointless in this context. The only intolerable song is the pop version of "Anytime You Need a Friend," performed by The Beu Sisters and standing out like a very sore thumb. The score itself has all the charm of Menken's previous efforts, with pieces of Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame evident and the Western theme from the opening chorus showing hints of "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Listening to this score is a refreshing taste of innocence on one hand but a ghostly reminder of the better glory days for the genre on the other. Snippets of that old Menken magic rebound in portions of both the score and songs for Home on the Range, but it's difficult to compare it to Menken's others given its distinct genre style. He does spice up the equation with several credited statements of Ennio Morricone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a few uncredited influences from Elmer Bernstein as well. Menken's own version of the end title song, performed himself vocally and on solo piano, seems to try to borrow an idea from Randy Newman's success at the time. In the end, Home on the Range succeeds best when Menken follows the formulas that brought him his prior triumphs, including the constant adaptation of the song melodies into the score. Unfortunately, Home on the Range may not have been the best of films with which to make a comeback, and it does sound like City Slickers far too frequently, but it represented an important start to Menken's Disney comeback. To hear him starting his engines once again in 2004, however, barely gained his efforts a fourth star.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download