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•	2008 La-La Land Album

•	1992 Edel Album

•	2019 Notefornote (Standard)

•	2019 Notefornote (Limited)

•	2012 Intrada Album

•	2008 La-La Land Album

Among the few highlights of Masters of the Universe for movie-going masses was the fact that the project represented the second appearance of actress Courtney Cox on screen, but true Eternia fans were only impressed with Meg Foster and her striking pale eyes in the underutilized role of Evil-Lyn and, of course, Bill Conti's original score. Given the massive scale of Conti's recording, it's safe to say that sufficient money was stashed away at the start of production to pay for the composer and such a large ensemble. Well, enough for Conti, at least. Due to a plethora of reasons not entirely immune from financial difficulties, the score for Masters of the Universe had to be recorded with several orchestras in Europe, yielding less than stellar results pieced together cue by cue depending upon which musicians could handle the composition at that moment. The players in Munich responsible for the mass of the recording were simply incapable of performing the most complex cues for any lengthy period of time, requiring that shorter takes be awkwardly spliced together to form a score that valiantly attempted to match what Conti had written on paper. The composer himself was coming off of his remarkable success for The Right Stuff and the Rocky scores. He never tried to hide his inspiration when conjuring his Wagnerian structures and explosively broad tone for Masters of the Universe, readily admitting where he looked for guidance in such a relatively straight forward assignment. To his credit, he pulls out all the stops in his effort to plagiarize Gustav Holst's "The Planets" and John Williams' own adaptations of that piece in already famous fantasy fanfares. The brassy, snare-driven score rarely stops to breathe in between extended performances of the title theme and Skeletor's shamelessly "Mars"-like subtheme, and for the lumbering Lungdren, the music really has to be so immensely propelling to keep our attention away from his painfully delivered dialogue. A problem arises in the fact that nearly every aspect of these themes seems contrite to a certain degree, almost stumbling into humorous parody territory at regular intervals.

One must ask: Is Masters of the Universe a score in which Conti is just trying to adapt himself to the exact sound the producers wanted? Or did he intentionally attempt a Star Wars and Superman knock-off with levity? Or both? The music is consistently upbeat, even in statements of the villain's theme, leaving you with an all-too-fresh feeling of the awkwardly rendered tone of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that seems just a tad out place. Never does the music indicate that true peril is ensuing, nor do the character-building subthemes for woodwinds stand out as anything special. The "Cosmic Key" theme, conjured originally by the director and adapted well by Conti into some of the earthlings' sentimental passages, is a highlight in several softer cues even though it's suffocated by surrounding pomp. Only occasionally does Conti utilize varied percussion to represent the world of Eternia and its eclectic characters, and thus, the traditional orchestral force sounds almost too streamlined in its perpetually patriotic tone for the subject matter. The excess of high-range percussive elements and major key fanfares are the primary reasons for this overly-optimistic tone. Aside from the ridiculously upbeat nature of cues like "Skeletor Arrives" in Masters of the Universe, the underlying constructs created by Conti are simply too flagrantly informed by John Williams' classic Bronze Age scores to ignore. Damn near the entirety of Masters of the Universe sounds as though it was composed by Williams (without the intricacies of his writing) for an event like the Olympics. As bold and ambitious as Conti's music is in all of its thunderous cymbal crashes and timpani rolls, the themes and related fragments are stale renditions of Williams' Superman music, and despite the harmonic pleasures that the music delivers, significant deficiencies in inspiration drag the score down. The fatal blow to Conti's score is the total disregard for the theme from the television show; even the equally-flawed, animated Transformers film of the era used the television show theme. This was reportedly a flippant but conscious choice by Conti, and his decision to ignore the original "He-Man" theme here is simply inexcusable.

On album, the music is still considered by many to be a triumph for Conti, and it has been released several times through the years, selling out each time. The original, 42-minute 1987 album released by Varèse Sarabande concurrently to the film's debut was a very early CD and fell out of print within a few years. A 1992 expanded issue by Silva Screen added 27 minutes in five major cues and was temporary available to collectors in the soundtrack specialty market before itself falling out of print. In 2008, La-La Land Records finally resurrected the score in its complete form, even throwing the redundant, original 1987 album mix onto the end of a second CD for good measure. The performance quality doesn't differ much, nor does the quality of the mix, though the source of the mastering for the album arrangement is reportedly superior. The first version of "End Credits" on the 2008 release has some distinct distortion in the bass region upon some timpani hits in the villain's theme performance, however. The five to ten minutes of fresh material heard on this 2-CD set for the first time on album is quickly swallowed up by surrounding music. Given the problematic lack of variation and nuance in this score's performances, this revelation shouldn't come as a surprise. Still, the 3,000 copies of the 2008 product were expended rather quickly and Intrada Records re-issued the base, complete film mix presentation from the La-La Land offering (combining that material onto one CD) for a 2012 pressing that lasted for a few years on the market before itself selling out. In 2019, Notefornote Music pressed only 500 copies of essentially the 2008 La-La Land product but with a slightly different ordering and spread of the tracks. After that product sold out in just three days, Notefornote bowed to fan pressure to press another 500 copies of only the first CD of that set later in 2019, this time emulating the 2012 Intrada product ahead of their other intent, which was a vinyl release of the score. This second run also sold out, though it took longer to do so. Overall, fans of the original television show will be disappointed by Conti's lack of loyalty to the established franchise sound, and other score collectors could find the composer's hopelessly optimistic and stale fanfares to be tedious after half an hour. No amount of superior album treatment can hide the fundamental flaws of a score that impresses casual fans with its bravado but fails to creatively capture the spirit of the concept.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download