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.
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