Otherwise, despite the replacement of the religious component with a tribal one, King Solomon's Mines indeed plays like a tongue in cheek parody of Williams' Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film deserved nothing more or less, and Goldsmith's score pretty much nails the prevailing attitude of the production. But in matching the shallow tone of the film, Goldsmith's score suffers from a fate very similar to his music for Supergirl a year earlier. It's technically smart and effective (and thus a fan favorite for the composer's avid collectors) but also ultimately tedious and obnoxious in its overly positive spirit, straying into the territory of trite futility in parts. Listeners friendly towards Supergirl and its airy symphonic atmosphere will be likely, therefore, to appreciate King Solomon's Mines. The flighty tone of the adventure is equal in both Supergirl and King Solomon's Mines, yielding sibling scores of similar thematic jubilation and orchestral ruckus that dominates the soundscape with overflowing pomp. The title march in King Solomon's Mines is exuberant to a fault, prancing on trumpets with a kind of pretentious heroism usually reserved for straight parody scores. Goldsmith's loyalty to this idea is admirable, though its cartoonish demeanor, not helped by wild xylophone lines in its ranks, makes it memorable whether you like its tone or not. Out of this theme's underlying rhythm does develop one of the two better aspects of King Solomon's Mines, a driving string and percussion identity familiar to the better portions of Explorers and The Swarm. Heard more frequently as the score progresses, this idea flourishes in "Under the Train," a amusingly faithful rip-off of the truck chase sequence in Raiders of the Ark that is followed so closely in structural formula by Goldsmith that the tempo of the rhythm (and key) even increases as the unlikely pursuit continues.

A little more original is Goldsmith's love theme for King Solomon's Mines, a piece that would strangely inform Michael Giacchino's primary idea for 2009's Star Trek in its elegantly swaying progressions. Introduced in "Good Morning," it serves as the usual finale crescendo and a bridge for title theme's concert arrangement. The use of the Wagner piece in the actual underscore for King Solomon's Mines is limited to a handful of fragments within cues, but it's quite distracting in its famous progressions. The tribal sequences offer some impressive bursts of percussion, but they are not on par with Goldsmith's best (see The Ghost and the Darkness). Ultimately, the key to King Solomon's Mines is its carefree attitude, and even in its most harrowing action pieces, it's hard not to get the impression that Goldsmith intended no straight-faced outcome for much of this recording. The performance by The Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra isn't always perfect, but it handles most of the composer's usual complexities of competing lines. The history of King Solomon's Mines on CD is lengthy. Originally following Alan Silvestri's Delta Force on a 1987 Milan product from Europe, the score was expanded from 34 to 60 minutes on a 1991 Intrada album that was re-issued in 1997 (both with cover art from the film's sequel, awkwardly). A 2006 Prometheus album stretched the score to 70 minutes (with interesting but not necessary bonus cues) and corrected some digital transfer problems that had affected the playback speed of the music on previous albums. In 2014, Quartet Records revisited the score (by this point, the Prometheus album was out of print) and presented a 2-CD arrangement that eliminated some nuisance crossfades between tracks and included both the film and album edits of the score on separate CDs. A remastering also highlights the 2014 product. In the end, Goldsmith's title theme would live on in Michael Linn's music for the 1986 sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, though given its irritatingly bloated sense of enthusiasm, that may not have been a good thing.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download